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Secret

secret
Photo by Gina Easley

By Beth Kaplan

I’d been looking for her for twenty-six years, periodically Googling both her name and the various ways I thought her workplace might come up. But Penny Harris, my beloved childhood friend, remained invisible. And then last week, I was struck with one of those ideas that spark through the air: although neither of us had ever used her full name back then, I should try it now. Penelope.

In an instant, there she was: Penelope Jane Harris. It was her obituary. She died in August 2019. I was too late.

The memory of the last time I’d seen her haunted me.

•••

“Name’s Penny,” she said. “What’s yours?”

Penny wore thick-framed glasses, her straight black hair cut in a pudding bowl, pale skin erupting into angry patches of red. We met at a neighborhood birthday party where neither she nor I knew how we’d come to be invited. While the in-crowd girls in their frilly dresses gossiped and giggled and played Pin the Tail on the Donkey in the den, Penny and I sat on the turquoise brocade sofa in the living room swooning over our favourite book, Little Women. She preferred intrepid Jo, and I my namesake, saintly Beth. I told Penny that I wept for days after reading the tragic chapter where Beth says goodbye to Jo and then dies with the sun shining on her sweet face.

Penny’s head drooped. She touched her eye, then leaned over and smeared a wet finger down my cheek.

“Real tears,” she whispered.

“Wow. She’s weirder than I am,” I thought, touching the damp on my face, “and she doesn’t care.”

We were soulmates.

This was Halifax in 1962. She was thirteen. I was eleven.

•••

My new best friend lived in a child’s drawing kind of house, a white box with a pointy roof and black-shuttered windows. The windows were always closed, the downstairs rooms spotless and airless. Penny’s dad was tall and hurried, like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland; when Penny introduced us, he bent quickly to shake my fingertips and vanished. Her mother was short and wiry with sharp eyes and a sharp voice. She was always tired, never offered Kool-Aid and cookies like mothers were supposed to. It was clear she wasn’t keen on me, Penny’s only good friend, coming over to play, but she never allowed her daughter to visit my house, I didn’t know why. She ordered us to keep quiet. Quiet!

We tiptoed to Penny’s room and closed the door. Playing outside, even in the backyard, was not an option; my friend was always wheezing with allergies and asthma. She also had eczema, scaly bumpy patches on her elbows and the backs of her knees that made her scratch until she bled, although she struggled not to. “My scratching,” she whispered once, “makes Mum very angry.”

We played with dolls, real ones and paper ones, while we talked about our schools and books and dreams. One day she wanted to tell me a secret.

“Guess what?” she murmured, pushing her glasses back up her nose, as she did constantly. “I was adopted.”

I’d never met anyone who was adopted and wasn’t sure how to respond. “Neat,” I said, holding the shapely new Barbie paper doll we’d been dressing. “Were … were you in an orphanage and everything?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “I heard my real mother had tons of kids already and didn’t have room for me.”

“I hope you were in an orphanage, Pen,” I said, thinking of Anne of Green Gables. “That’s so romantic.”

She turned away. “When I see a woman with lots of kids,” she said, her finger tracing the bright paper dress in her lap, “I wonder if she’s my mother. I wonder if she ever changed her mind.”

I’d often imagined I was adopted. Surely my actual birth parents were nicer than the ones I was stuck with. But deep down I knew that was a fantasy, whereas, it shocked me to realize, Penny really did not know who her birth parents were.

I was a demonstrative girl and wanted to hug her, but I sensed it best to keep my distance. We never touched.

Penny was excited to invite me one Saturday for lunch with her parents. We sat stiffly in the dining room around a large mahogany table, exchanging awkward remarks, while her mother served Campbell’s tomato soup and Kraft cheese sandwiches, not quite enough for the four of us.

My family has lots of problems, I thought, but coming up with food and conversation is not one of them. If I’d been invited back for a meal, I would have found an excuse not to go. But I was never asked again.

•••

Penny and I were mad for figurines. When either of us had saved enough allowance, we’d get the bus downtown to Woolworth’s on Barrington Street and buy a new figurine, small china horses mostly. We gave them names: Violin, Dancer, Fanfare. One day, playing stables in her room, we decided to create special homes for our horses out of whatever we could find. I sprawled on the floor on one side of her bed, and she on the other, in silence all afternoon, making up dramas.

For some time, our afternoons together were dedicated to creating a miniature exhibition that we called Project X. I would decide, say, on a hospital scene and make beds out of cardboard and Kleenex, an operating room of Plasticine and matchboxes, a row of bandaged horses lined up, recovering. Wheezing on the other side, Penny was creating a fairy horse’s treehouse of old cheesecloth dusters, bits of jewellery, wood scraps glued together.

And then we had the thrilling notion to create an entire new world; words and ideas tumbling out, we pieced the story together. I became Helen Foster and she Kristine Foster, orphan twins—fraternal, not identical—whose parents had died in a terrible fire. We’d been sent to stay with our curmudgeonly Aunt Gwendolyn on Foster Island, off the coast of England. In real life, I was sturdy with short brown hair, but my willowy Helen was completely different, with blonde locks cascading to her waist and a delicate face and voice. Everyone loved Helen for her selfless kindness. Penny’s Kristine was a fierce, reckless tomboy always charming her way out of scrapes. “She looks like me,” said Penny, “only prettier.”

Foster Island was mostly fields and woods, so we had our own horses. Mine, Champ, was a golden palomino. Kristine’s Firefly was a pinto. We rode bareback.

Penny and I kept two diaries, one for Foster Island and one for our real lives. At home, I was miserably caught between my parents, who’d separated once and still frightened me with their quarrels. Though I’d been pressed into reluctant service as my mother’s confidante, my little brother, with his blonde curls and dimples, was the adored favorite of them both. The injustice of my exclusion from my father’s heart burned in me. Dad, a noisy social activist, intimated that girls who liked dolls and dresses were boring conformists. He wanted a rebellious tomboy, like my Foster Island sister Kristine.

But I was gentle Helen, and despite the pain caused me by others, I tried to forgive everyone and everything. “Helen,” I wrote in my Beth diary, “is a kind of saint with an indescribable inner radiance.” When my mother yelled that I should clean my room, or Dad smacked the side of my head for some misdemeanour, as he often did, I’d choke back tears and do my best to turn into Helen. In my room, I’d look around at the jumble and murmur, “Oh, dear Kristine, look what a mess you’ve made! I’ll clean it up for you.” And humming softly, I sorted the clothes, tidied the papers, put away the stacks of books. How good it felt to be someone else, neat and serene and cherished.

With all my miseries, however, I sensed in the way Penny crept about her sealed home that her life was way worse than mine. Although she was an only child, I never saw her parents hug her or even talk much to her. Sometimes when she opened the front door, I tried not to notice her swollen eyes. On those days, as I stepped inside, the white house felt darker than ever. But I pushed away any thoughts about my friend’s difficulties; maybe the chilly remoteness I sensed in her home was normal and happened in other homes. In all our time together, Penny and I never discussed our family situations or our parents. I caught glimpses of her real-life diary, covered with her big black scrawl, but never saw what she wrote. We only discussed Foster Island—how we, brave sisters, could thwart foolish, crabby Aunt Gwendolyn to get what we wanted.

Drawing of the cottage, courtesy Beth Kaplan

One afternoon, a new treat: Kristine and Helen discovered a perfect little house deep in the forest. We loved being on Foster Island, but the secret cottage was our favorite place. In my Helen diary, I drew a picture of it, hidden in the trees, with a thatched roof and bright sunny windows. There were matching hooked rugs in the bedroom, beside Kristine’s bed and mine. Champ and Firefly grazed in the field of wildflowers outside the front door.

By the time Penny turned fourteen, she had a bra and her period and had discovered pop music. “You don’t listen to the hit parade?” she asked one day, and I boiled at the condescension in her voice. She began to spend her money not on figurines but on 45s, which she insisted on playing for me, snapping her fingers. I told her “Louie Louie” was the stupidest song I’d ever heard. “I guess twelve is too young to get it,” she shrugged.

The change in my friend upset me. But still, most weekends, she and I sailed to our island and played there all day.

When Penny told me her father had taken a job in Victoria on the other side of the country, we both cried real tears. But immediately, we turned our separation into a story. Kris, we decided, was being sent far away to a special boarding school, but her unfortunate twin couldn’t go. Helen’s faithful German Shepherd had chased a rabbit onto the road, and she’d thrown herself in front of a speeding car to save him. Legs crushed, she was now confined to a wheelchair. But she bore her disability with infinite patience.

Penny and I swore to write to each other forever, and for a while we did, one letter from friend to friend, and another, in the same envelope, from sister to sister. I wrote to Penny that school was a drag and I was making a Hayley Mills scrapbook, and Helen told Kristine she was gaining strength in her legs and “I might even walk with crutches one day!” There were also notes in Aunt Gwendolyn’s flowery script, hoping her far-away niece was doing her algebra homework and eating her lima beans.

Envelopes from my friend included scribbled missives to Aunt Gwendolyn from despairing teachers at Kristine’s school, while Penny wrote about the actual boarding school her parents had decided to send her to, which she liked a lot and where she’d made a friend. And then came the day Penny sent only one letter. “I can’t do Foster Island anymore,” she wrote. “I’m too old for little kid crap.”

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I was not ready to be exiled. Just a bit longer, please, I wanted to beg.

A few days later, I carefully hand-printed and mailed an official-looking document. “To Miss Kristine Foster,” it said. “We regret to inform you that Foster Island has been destroyed by a long dormant volcano. Everything on the island was buried except for a burned and twisted wheelchair. Please accept our sincerest apologies, and best wishes for your future.” 

Penny did not reply.

•••

More than three decades later, I was invited to Vancouver to act in a play. A forty-five-year-old single mother, I was also a former actress attempting a comeback. One night, waiting for me at the stage door was a familiar form with dark pudding bowl hair, pale blotchy skin, and black-rimmed glasses. I knew her instantly. “Penny!” I exclaimed. “Real tears!”

We met for coffee, spilling over with fond reminiscences of Project X and Foster Island. I told her about the confused decade of my twenties, my marriage and divorce, my two children and recent work as a writer. Despite all those vivid fantasies, I said, I now write only nonfiction because I value true stories most. It has taken a long time and a lot of professional help, I said, but I feel pretty good about life.

At forty-seven, Penny had never had a partner and had always lived alone, but she enjoyed her work hunting down tax cheats for Canada Revenue. “I think I might be gay,” she said, looking sharply at me to see if I was shocked, “but I’m really not sure.” I told her many of my artsy friends were gay, and I’d even explored, briefly, if I was too. Another bond.

Waiting until the waitress had refilled our coffee cups and left, my friend leaned closer and told me softly that her mother had recently died.

“After the funeral,” she said, her face expressionless, “Dad finally apologized to me for what happened during my childhood.”

As she took a breath to go on, I knew. I knew what she was going to say.

“There was something really wrong with Mum,” Penny said, pushing her glasses back up her nose, her voice monotone. “I mean emotionally, mentally. She liked to torture me. My playtime with you was one of my only escapes.”

My stomach heaved as my friend talked about years of anguish at the hands of her mother. “She locked me in the basement—sometimes I didn’t even know why,” she said, as I shook my head in horror. “She beat me and mocked me when I cried. Or it was just that she wouldn’t give me anything to eat. No dinner for you for a week, she’d say.”

“Oh, my friend,” I said, appalled.

“Before I met you, my parents adopted a little boy, Sean,” she told me, chapped hands gripping her coffee cup. “He was the joy of my life. I’d run home from school to take care of him. Then one day, I got home and Sean was gone. Without a word of warning, my mother’d sent him back. She told me she couldn’t cope with him,” Penny said, “and if I wasn’t careful, the same thing would happen to me.”

I writhed in my seat, heartsick. “I should have done something, helped in some way,” I cried.

“Nobody knew what was going on, Beth,” she said, so quietly I could hardly hear. “No one.”

I made a move to hug my friend, to convey concern and care, but the prickly barrier surrounding her was as impenetrable as ever. Perhaps now as then, I thought, admitting vulnerability, allowing in compassion, would hurt too much.

We pledged to renew our correspondence—not by email, but by real mail, like always—and after my return home, the letters began to flow again. Being in touch with a treasured childhood friend, reading her familiar black scrawl, gave me immense pleasure; something vital and long missing had been found. I smiled to think how wise we’d been back then, two intense, unhappy girls who’d imagined themselves, with such vivid detail, into a kinder place. Though still anxious and hyper-sensitive, I was well on my way to feeling truly at home in the world. I hoped my friend was as well.

One day she wrote to say she had exciting news: she’d met a wonderful man and was madly in love. He was struggling financially, she said, with an unfair, demanding ex-wife and two children; last year, through no fault of his own, he’d lost his job. She had invited him to live at her place and would gladly support him until he got back on his feet. She was sure he’d soon find a job, and her life would be happier than it had ever been.

“Do you remember our secret cottage in the woods?” she wrote. “I feel like I live there now.”

“Yikes, no, Penny,” I said out loud. How could I not be concerned by what she’d described, her lonely susceptibility to what sounded like a manipulative man? Should I say something? I’d failed to help her a long time ago and must do so now. But how? Finally, thinking I might be the only person she trusted, wanting above all to protect her, I wrote a gentle letter, begging her to be careful with her heart.

I never heard from her again.

•••

After all those years of wondering about and trying to reach my friend, I wept to read the brevity of her obituary: Penelope Jane Harris, August 31 1948 – August 19 2019. There were no messages of condolence. I was desolate. If only just once I’d been able to offer an embrace, to express my love, my gratitude for her courage and her imagination and her friendship.

And then, by the miracle of the Internet, I discovered something else: a B.C. woman named Penelope Harris had donated two parcels of land to a local First Nation. I clicked further and found a series of photographs. This Penelope Harris had very short white hair and no glasses. But I knew the cheekbones, the eyebrows. Her lively face.

Penny had bought two small parcels of land near Prince George as an investment; decades later, the area still undeveloped, she’d given the land to the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation. In April 2019, she travelled from her home in Abbotsford to Prince George for a ceremony during which they’d celebrated her generosity.

“I feel there is nothing we can do to fix all the things we’ve done wrong as a society to Canada’s Aboriginal peoples,” she said in a speech to the local press. “The line we were all fed about what the Canadian identity was, how great the Canadian story was, that has now fallen to pieces for all to see. Good. We were all duped. We’ve been lied to for generations. But we know that now.

“What are we doing now to make things right?” she concluded.

In his response, the chief called her gift “reconciliation in action.”

“We will always think of Ms. Harris as one of us,” he said.

Penny died four months later.

The First Nation community gave my friend a beautiful black and red hand-embroidered jacket. In the photos, she’s wearing the ceremonial coat, and her face is radiant.

 

•••

BETH KAPLAN, a former actress, has taught memoir and personal essay writing at two Toronto universities for decades. She’s the author of four nonfiction books: two memoirs, a biography, and a guide to writing memoir that’s the textbook for her courses. Her next book, an essay compilation, is nearly finished. Her website and blog are at bethkaplan.ca.

 

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My Lovely Tree

 

tree
Photo courtesy Eliza Thomas

By Eliza Thomas

When my daughter was nine, I bought a tiny Norfolk Pine in a tiny plastic pot. It was my only houseplant. I’m not the kind of person who hangs lush ferns in the windows and grows lemon trees in the corners of the living room, though I wish I were. I wish I knew how to sprout an avocado pit and keep it alive forever; I wish I knew about orchids. But I do know myself. I forget to water my houseplants and they dry out, and then they turn brown, and then they die, which is depressing. I gave up long ago trying to become a better plant person. Still, it was winter and cold and dark, and I wanted something that was alive, however briefly. I didn’t want a hacked down tree. We put our Norfolk Pine on a table and adorned it with tinsel and outsized Christmas ornaments and called it done.

To my astonishment the tiny tree survived. Stubborn, it lasted through the cold, dark winter and through the extended periods of drought I imposed upon it. It even survived being knocked over numerous times by child and dog, its soil strewn across the floor, its pitiful roots exposed. I could, and should, have celebrated its persistence, but instead the tree reminded me precisely how terrible I was with houseplants. It made me feel guilty just looking at it. You are a Bad Person, it seemed to tell me, when I’d finally remember to water it after weeks and weeks of neglect. I tried to find another home for my tree, offering it to various neighbors, but nobody wanted it. Maybe my tree realized what was what. Maybe it said to itself: Well then. I’ll just keep very still and try not to grow very much.

But it did grow, despite itself, despite me, despite everything. At some point it outgrew its tiny pot and I transferred it to a larger plastic bucket, although I do not recall doing so. It’s now a leggy three-and-a-half feet tall, with long uneven branches. People who know about houseplants have informed me that a Norfolk Pine isn’t a true pine, but I’m not sure what that means or what difference it makes. I do understand that Norfolk Pines don’t like too much water and don’t want too much direct sunlight. In point of fact: my tree has survived. My neighbor, a retired landscape gardener, called it “scrawny” and small for its age, but otherwise healthy.

Eighteen years have passed since I brought it home. Almost two decades gone poof, and my daughter has moved away, and two old dogs have broken my heart, but my tree refuses to leave. The landscape gardener neighbor suggested that it would benefit from a bigger bucket, so this past summer I bought a gigantic pot, along with the most expensive bag of potting soil available. I plopped the tree into its roomy new home, patted the dirt in place, and gave it some water, but not too much. There you go, I told it. It takes up the whole table, but I don’t mind.

Because despite myself, despite everything, I now know that I love my tree. After years of fretting and feeling guilty, I’m glad that I couldn’t give it away. I’m glad it didn’t die. These are not the best of times, and I’m glad that my tree seems unaware of that fact. I appreciate how it just keeps to itself and keeps on growing, albeit imperceptibly. Love has grown imperceptibly as well; my affection for this tree has crept up on me. Next summer I will lug it, my one and only successful houseplant, out to the back porch. I’ll sit next to it with a cup of coffee as it basks in the morning sunlight. I’ll bring it back inside before the first chill of fall, and when it outgrows its current pot I’ll find a bigger one. Norfolk Pines, I’ve read with some consternation, may get to be twenty feet tall indoors. I’ll deal with that somehow. I look forward to such a fine problem.

But for now, we are set. Look at you now! I say when I walk by its table. My lovely tree! Ah, it says, stretching its lopsided limbs with pleasure, filling in the empty spaces with its perfect, stubborn life.

•••

ELIZA THOMAS is a piano teacher and accompanist. In a former life, she imagined herself a beginning writer. That was ages ago however, and she is happy to be working again on essays and stories. She lives in Vermont with two dogs and one houseplant.

 

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Good Neighbors

community
Photo by Gina Easley

By Kate Sweeney

A couple of years ago, I was walking by myself through our neighborhood when I spied a couple—a young man and woman—with a little girl in a stroller, about the age of my own child.

“Oh! You have a kid?” I blurted out, following up quickly with what I hoped was a non-creepy-lady-accosting-a-couple-on-the-street smile. “How old is she?”

“She’s three,” said the woman and then quickly added, “but we’re about to move,” raising a hand as if to stop me right there. The gesture was not unlike that of a married person in a bar flashing her ring finger.

I wanted to ask her: How did she know I had a child? Had other people stopped them like this? Because her response felt rote, like she and her husband had spent their entire tenure in our neighborhood fending off would-be play-daters. And, more important to me: If this was the case, where were these other desperate neighborhood parents? Because I wanted to meet them.

This interaction seems innocuous enough: a mother looking for other families to hang with. A gesture that stems from a longing, as much for people as for place—a precise sort of Shangri-La that’s common enough in the American psyche—a neighborhood composed largely of kids and parents. In this place, people stroll up to one another’s porches to borrow a cup of flour, to lend a watchful eye and a playmate, or just to exchange a casual hello or a joke. The streets of this Eden are littered with bikes, scooters, and sidewalk chalk. Halloweens are epic. The version that I envisioned stopped short of manicured lawns and signs in kitchens reading, “Wine O’Clock.” We are urban liberals, after all—with aging hipsters’ razor-blade sense of what’s beyond the pale, cool-wise. But facts were facts: We lived in an intown neighborhood—a quiet place full of quiet streets and houses with closed doors behind which folks kept to themselves.

During my son’s prime toddler playdate years, I was never quite successful at finding that Shangi-La. And that fact held within it echoes of other times and places, a longing for home even as I was in it.

This isn’t a story about mere loneliness. It’s about place.

•••

A few years out of college, I was absorbed by the desire to live in a commune, or intentional community, or whatever you call it when neighbors are all cooking together in a big group kitchen but minus the bearded dude in orange robes who sleeps with all the women and the person in sunglasses standing off to the side holding a briefcase filled with everyone’s trust-fund money.

My imagination landed on a place called Zendik Farm in the mountains of North Carolina. This was the early 2000s, when the Zendik Farm people would still come into the Little Five Points neighborhood in Atlanta selling tee-shirts, pamphlets, and bumper stickers that read, in bold black sans-serif: “Stop bitching. Start a revolution.”

I did not know what this revolution was, but I imagined it had something to do with living off the land, with giving the finger to the establishment and learning to survive by your own wits along with a group of like-minded, can-do people.

One day someone left a Zendik Farm pamphlet in the coffeeshop where I worked. It was full of long, rambling sentences about the philosophy of their founder, a super-pure guy with a salt-and-pepper beard and long hair like ocean waves who had died just a couple of years earlier. Now, his surviving wife, of equally beatific calm and oceanic salt-and-pepper waves, had taken over, and all of this—the rambling philosophy, the worship of these old hippies—made it abundantly clear that I would never fit in there … but maybe, if I had to? I could try? I thought. Because geographically speaking, this was still the closest thing to Atlanta resembling my dream of getting the hell away and living life for real.

I was twenty-four, George W. Bush was president, and I was angry. I spent my days pedaling my bike between the coffeeshop where I worked and the cramped apartment I shared with my boyfriend, a fellow angry coffee-slinger. Our courtship had taken place fast, a romantic freefall in the midst of a string of bad roommates that had us moving in together almost immediately. That first year of our relationship is a red-eyed blur of free carbs and caffeine from work and talking together late into the night. I read his Punk Planet magazines and listened to his music, both of which electrified me. He was very much into a certain brand of moral purity: He taught me the term “DIY.”  During this time, I read one of my boyfriend’s favorite novels, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and dreamed of joining its characters in chopping down billboards and performing other righteous acts of environmental vandalism. I did my best to ignore the fact that there was a lot of page space dedicated to the amazing tits and ass of the Gang’s righteous female environmental vandal. I also borrowed a book from a coworker about animal tracking, written by a white man who said he learned this skill from a Noble Native American. My boyfriend and I daydreamed about learning these skills so that we could survive when the shit went down, but I never finished the tracking book, and, to tell the truth, neither of us so much as gardened or camped. He didn’t know how to cook rice. I had trouble hammering a single nail.

•••

The other day in the car, I was listening to a young indie rock band I’d never heard before. The chorus they sang erupted in the words: “The world has left us behind/oh, the world has left us behind,” and before I knew I had any reaction at all, I found myself spitting bitterly at the speaker, “I have no ‘us,’ I have no ‘us!’”

In a flash, I understood the singers to be singing about themselves as the millennials or Gen Z’ers whose very future has been stomped out by forebearers who’d inflicted environmental and economic ruin on this world. Left behind. And believe me, I more-than-sympathize, but at that moment, something mean in me struck out, something jealous of the club membership insinuated by the song’s righteous, mournful pluck. Sure, they’d been left behind, but they’d been left behind together.

I was born in a generational split. I did not share in the seatbelt-less 1970s childhoods of my sisters, both far older than me, nor am I a member of the hyper-scrutinized generation that came after. Sitting, as I do, in a late ’70s gap year of comparatively few American births, no marketing strives exactly to target me. All my life, it seems, this has put me at a distance. A distance from my older sisters and their shared childhoods. A distance from other kids, who, it seemed, were all far older or far younger than me in the lonely suburban neighborhood where I grew up. And at a distance, today, from coworkers who are just five or six years younger, but with figures of speech and ways of being that often seem utterly foreign.

Much of the time, I like this distance. Distance—from any natural tribe or club or gang—is where I spent my entire childhood, and so it has come to mean comfort. I spent my childhood sitting under tables and around corners, forgotten, listening in and learning. I’m an observer, and much of the time, that feels like enough. But not always.

•••

In the coffeeshop, the staff was an us. The people we served, as we viewed them, were mostly white yuppies. My boyfriend didn’t like them, a dislike he shared with the rest of our close-knit gang of coworkers. They—we, I guess—were fiercely dedicated to one another: workers-of-the-world united by the reality that the American Dream was a bunch of bullshit and that to own a house or work something more than either a proletarian gig or a selfless nonprofit job helping our fellow man signaled corruption.

Something in me was suspect, though. I harbored dreams above and beyond that of our little food service community, and this made me a pet. “Here comes Katy, cub reporter!” a coworker would declare as I rushed in from the public radio station where I had scored something like a part-time unpaid internship. I flinched at this condescension; it made me try harder. My first tattoo was a traditional sailor’s-style number covering my entire chest, and my coworkers, standing around the chair where I lay prone in a velvet-curtained studio, cheered as one to see the needle first hit flesh.

•••

After three turbulent years, my boyfriend and I broke up. Among other things, my ambition had shown through. Careerist, he called me when I chose my reporting job over a move with him to the Midwest, to work at his brother’s fair-trade coffee business. We made several more attempts after then, including the last: a winter flight north to his attic apartment, whose kitchen lacked both butter and salt. The summer before, during the heady days just before the market crash, he had considered buying a house; he was still kind of broke but qualified for an amazing loan. Now, late at night, the snow falling on the thin roof of the saltless, butter-less garret, our last fight: He called me “a little gold-digger-y” for the way I’d salivated over the idea of being with a man who owned a house.

To be fair, I probably had.

By then, I was living with grad school roommates in a crumbling old manor house chopped into apartments. This was on the North Carolina coast. The house was a gorgeous, decaying thing: pocket doors with stained glass windows, sky-high ceilings, cockroaches, and walls with literal mouse holes, like in cartoons. Ours was the apartment famous for parties, and during one marked by an unusual level of debauchery—unsavory couplings on the kitchen floor and a mystery guest or two—my most precious cache of jewelry, including the mother-of-pearl earrings made from a grandfather’s cufflinks, disappeared from the hall closet where I’d stashed them in a fit of distrust, as the windows of my ground-floor bedroom didn’t quite close.

If grad school life in the crumbling manor house apartment did not provide security, it did provide a level of community that I haven’t been able to match since. My bedroom was the smallest of three. Located just off the kitchen, it had once been the maids’ quarters: it connected to a second, smaller, windowless room behind it. This was my inner sanctum where I spent mornings and evenings writing. These were hours of wonderful, dreaming solitude, the kind of solitude that is wonderful because it’s not mandatory: Out there down the long hallway, there was always a space for me on the living room sofa where my roommates were watching bad reality television. Friends would walk the winding route back to my door to insist that I join them out on the porch for some wine and a game of corn hole. We cooked big breakfasts, and dinner parties were frequent. Dance parties blew off the steam and drama of grad school life, and—well, I told you where those led. It occurs to me now that the true greatness in those years lay mostly in the fact of living within walking distance of friends.

•••

Last night, a frequent dream returned: I am back in college. Not grad school, but undergrad. Out of some nebulous obligation, I have left my home, spouse, and child to go live with a nineteen-year-old in a dorm. In this version, classes were set to start the very next day, but I had no place to sleep. I drifted past the small cement block rooms inhabited by happily bunked students in sweatpants eating popcorn and studying, and, in the dramatic way of dreams, I wept as I walked, my sense of dispossession complete. Awakening was the same as always: a blessed relief as the ordinary landmarks of home spring up, the insecurities of my peripatetic youth drifting back into the ether.

•••

My household today is compact, tidy, and small: two adults and one child inhabiting nine hundred square feet. The last year and change have found us more circumscribed than ever, sealed off from the world by necessity during a time of pandemic. The benign sorts of border-intrusion that signal community—dinner parties and indoor play-dates—were mostly off-limits to everyone, a fact which, during the first weeks, acted on me as strange sedative, quieting any fears of missing out I may have previously harbored.

It was in this calm that I recognized the commonalities of the kind of community that I crave: It is an introvert’s dream, a just-add water brand you don’t have to work at. Put one way: a favorite childhood memory is lying with my ear to the yellow shag carpet in the upstairs hallway, listening to the grown-up party downstairs. I would waltz down in my nightgown; guests would smile at me, parents would say good-night, and then I could disappear again. Put still another: a few years ago, some ten or twelve years after my own dreams of selling all my belongings and moving to an actual intentional community had faded, I began investigating the golden age of American utopias: Alcott’s Fruitlands, New Harmony, Oneida. In part, I was trying to understand my own dream of disappearing into to a prefabricated community.

I don’t want to be responsible for making community happen. But I do, fiercely and with great longing, want for it to be. And to be part of it. And so, it turns out that the dear ex, who, in that moment of anger, called me “a little gold-digger-y” was right: A gold-digger doesn’t want to make an effort. She wants no lonely apartment, but a move-in-ready home, with all the small physical and emotional niceties this term implies. I’m so sorry, babe.

In the early months of the pandemic, I developed a different kind of sympathy, this one for my neighbors, the extraverted ones. I felt myself blessed, blessed, a thousand times blessed for the job and the home I still had—but also for the strange way in which this time was working in my favor. In my basement office, sunlight and birdsong pour in through one tiny window, and I was free of the mandatory small talk and sense of exposure that typify a day of open-floorplan office work.

And when I had to stretch my legs, there were options.

It’s an understatement to say I was no longer alone on my walks. Instead, one unlikely road near my house became the distanced Barcelona Ramblas of East Atlanta, populated each spring evening by joggers, young couples by the dozen, roommates tossing Frisbees as they strolled, and entire families—everyone awkwardly jostling to space themselves apart along the wide street that’s usually home to cars flying too fast past our houses.

In those weeks, I met three different parents with kids my child’s age. I loved everything about the chats I had with these people—their mutual genuine warmth and brevity, and how they ended with a mutual promise of playdates “after all this is over.” Sure, I would say, and in the quiet knowledge of options sometime down the road and the parting of ways that would occur within thirty seconds, I found perfection. We were all lonely now, but I was markedly less lonely than before in this level playing field: this one damaged world was all any of us had, not one of us bound for some other Shangri-La beyond our ordinary street on a glorious spring evening.

•••

And then, things changed, because they always do. The vague promises my neighbors and I made of future fellowship during those early days of the pandemic didn’t threaten my introvert’s bubble, and it turned out they never would. Looking back now, I cannot remember the specifics of what we promised, nor a single name. As spring became summer, the number of people I passed in the streets dwindled. In the baking heat of the parking lot outside the grocery store—the only place I ever went—we sweated through our masks. Once inside, I found it hard even to make eye contact with anyone, so repulsed was I by these other bodies which quickly became a mass of blurred, contagious humanity in my peripheral vision. And still, I felt lonely. Lonely and ineffectual as I kept our kid apart from the world, clicking away at “Donate” buttons on my phone during that summer of protest, and during the dark winter that followed, walking our old dog down empty streets while listening to news podcasts that kept me an informed, terrified citizen.

I’m not saying there weren’t moments. There was at least one.

A candlelight vigil honoring Congressman John Lewis sparked joy so sharp it was hard to distinguish from anger. After his death, hundreds of us walked beneath a highway overpass that sliced a Black neighborhood in half, our words reverberating back to us in waves of call and response: Good trouble. Good trouble. Good trouble!

It was a sudden full-body thunderclap of spirit that had everything to do with people and place. This explosive no to the dominant narrative of exclusion offered a double jolt of communality. We were home, and we were home.

•••

When I was younger, I imagined community to be a thing one secured and checked off a list, like a haircut that agrees with one’s chin or a writing career. (Joke’s on you, Young Me.) You find it and, bam, there you are around the campfire; you’ve not been rejected. These are your people and there is nothing further to seek. The other night I found myself around a real campfire, leading a birthday toast for my sweetheart. The fire had been late getting going and we complained as we waited: It was too cold, too dark to just stand around like this, but now we huzzahed as one, the periphery lurking, a barren wilderness at our backs, our little group of six or eight inching a bit closer now despite the continued risk of pandemic contagion.

It was one of those moments of ultimacy. But it was just a moment. There have been other fires, other toasts my whole life through with stretches of cold between. It will all find its way to me again. This thought occurred to me as I looked at the faces of our friends, all of us imperfectly fitted to one another but clinging close on this chilly fall night. Laughing at a joke, I sat down. My camp chair was a little too close to the flames and I knew that the next morning, I’d be dehydrated with itchy legs. For the moment, I bathed in the warmth anyway.

•••

KATE SWEENEY is a writer, podcast host and producer, and former public radio journalist living in Atlanta, Georgia. Her book American Afterlife, (UGA Press, 2014), earned a Georgia Author of the Year Award. Thomas Lynch called the book “a reliable witness and well-wrought litany to last things and final details.” Readers mostly tell her they were surprised it wasn’t a total bummer. Among other places, her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Utne Reader Online, Atlanta Magazine, New South, and Creative Loafing. More here: katesweeney.net 

 

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The Memory House

A tiny handmade house on clumps of dirt against a blue, cloudy sky. Represents "The Memory House," a childhood home
Photo by Gina Easley

By Melissent Zumwalt

Earlier this week, my husband and I arrived at my childhood home to help my mother move. She has lived on this spot for thirty-four years (since I was two years old). The last twenty-five of those years here, she spent against her will, a captive, hating this place, begging my dad to move. He passed away 363 days ago.

Since our coming, I often find Mom staring vacantly into the air, slumped over on the couch, listless. After decades of seeking an escape from this house, on the eve of her ultimate freedom, she is morose, maudlin, exhibiting something akin to Stockholm syndrome.

It now feels like maybe this whole move was my idea, that I thrust this upon her too soon after Dad’s passing. But the fact of the matter is, however we ended up here—it’s happening. The new owners take possession in five days, and somehow we have to get Mom out of here, physically and emotionally.

•••

The house itself is nothing special. A 1978 ranch model situated on an acre of land in the rural Willamette Valley of Oregon. It’s located in an unincorporated area not claimed by any town:  farm country.

My parents were not farmers, but most of the families in this area are, or were back then. The soil of the Willamette Valley is the most fertile in the nation, its own form of “black gold.” This rich earth alleviates the need for a green thumb to succeed as a gardener. There was the time Mom dug a hole in a corner of the front yard and simply threw our Halloween Jack-o-Lantern into it for disposal. We forgot about it until the next fall when a robust pumpkin plant emerged from the spot, gracing us with a bounty of fresh pumpkins.

Acreage of berries, hops and hay proliferated in the region, the air often permeated by the stench of manure, a rich scent of cow excrement I found revolting as a child. (How dramatic we were as kids on the school bus, making choking sounds and pantomiming gagging as we rode by particularly ripe fields). Later, it became a smell as nostalgic to me as wood smoke or pine.

The stillness of the region is all-encompassing, to the point of suffocation. A childhood friend slept over one night and found the force of the silence so unnerving she could not rest. The distance between houses and scant traffic leads to a night sky that is total in its blackness. Until I left home, I didn’t appreciate how few people had the opportunity to see the evening stars.

“Going into town” from here required a commitment. It would sound like we were loading up a wagon train, “Hey, we’re going into town. Do you need anything?” Trips like this were premeditated and would not be repeated for another week. With the time it took to travel out and back, there was never any concept of “running to the store” for a forgotten item or an impulse purchase. The same was true for getting to school or going to friends’ houses. Everything had to be planned, coordinated.

I was never interested in any of it, the rural lifestyle—and truth be told, my parents really weren’t either.

The house was chosen based on its physical isolation. There was no neighborhood of which to speak, no community, no one to cast judgment on us with disapproving eyes. My mom would tell me, only half-jokingly, that we ended up out here because we were “run out of town.”

When I was a baby, we lived in “city” limits (a bursting metropolis of less than 5,000 people). In those early years of our family, perhaps Dad’s hoarding affliction could still have been misconstrued as severe messiness. The garage filled up and spilled over with things—broken bicycles, greasy spools of rope, dilapidated cars, empty paint cans, rusty ladders—occupying the yard, the driveway, like a garbage dump.

Mom often recounted a story of one afternoon when she and I were home alone together. Holding me on her hip, she answered a knock at the door, and to her surprise, found a policeman standing there. He told her there were town ordinances. She was going to need to clean up her yard or he would have to fine her. With the pride she took in her appearance and her impeccable housekeeping skills, she choked up with embarrassment. She did not mention the mess was my dad’s. She spent the afternoon with a neighbor woman feverishly cleaning up the small yard and garage. When my dad came home, he was enraged. He hollered at her, red-faced, for touching his things, accusing her of trying to get rid of him. My dad was over six feet tall and barrel-chested. When angered, he was a charging bull. Mom looked for a way to make it work. Within a week, she found the house for sale in the country and they moved every last item away from the disparaging gaze of city life.

As an adult, I later recognized the extreme isolation I felt as a child, an isolation carried with me throughout my life, was a deliberate construct.

I didn’t anticipate moving Mom out this week would hold much emotion for me. After leaving home at seventeen, my return visits were infrequent at best. I preferred my parents, or more specifically, my mother, come to see me wherever I happened to be living—often in the most vibrant, densest places I could find. In my urban apartments, the sounds of ambulance sirens and the constant whirring of traffic soothed me to sleep like a lullaby. I gravitated to places pulsating with indicators of life: streetlights, headlights, neon lights. The non-stop presence of humanity was inescapable even inside my apartments, where the smell of my neighbors’ cooking infused the air and it was possible to hear them singing, coughing, laughing through the thin, shared walls. I never had to be alone.

•••

The house on Killins Loop served as the physical manifestation of our family’s neuroses.

Mom had her spaces, the front of the house and inside, where her OCD reigned. What, to most people, would be termed “spring cleaning”, constituted her normal weekly routine—fully emptying cupboards and scrubbing down shelves, vacuuming under couch cushions and flipping them over to preserve the longevity of the couch, washing walls, scouring the oven, moving the refrigerator to mop behind it. The pervasive aroma of Pine-Sol signaled her movement from one room to the next. Her cleaning was not cheerful. It was beleaguered, martyred. She’d clean through the house like an army on the move, muttering along the way, “None of you would care if I dropped dead except you wouldn’t have anyone to clean up after you.”

She enforced strict rules with us (never sit on the bed, never eat outside the kitchen); issued protocols around putting things away (precisely how to fold the blanket on the couch when done using it, specifically how to tuck the chairs back in under the table); told us exactly where things should go (shoes off upon entering the front door, how and where to line them up), taught how to turn appliances on and off to keep them functionable for maximum lifespan. I grew up under an uncompromising regimen, like being raised at basic training by a drill sergeant.

And Mom conceded Dad his spaces, mostly outside, the back acre and the barn, where his hoarding dominated. His stuff piled up to the rafters of the barn and cascaded out, covering the yard and becoming entangled with the rampant, wild vegetation, incorporating crazy things like boat motors (we had no boat) and discarded school lockers and unwieldy strips of sheet metal twenty feet long and objects that had become unrecognizable over time. There was no system to any of it. Wherever he put something down last, that’s where it stayed, and he heaped new things on top of old as he brought them in.

Dad’s compulsion tried to overpower hers. His junk would begin to infiltrate the inside of the house through the tacked-on sun porch he’d built, accumulating around his desk, on the table, starting out innocuously as stacks of receipts, losing lotto tickets, used nails. But then it expanded into mounds of inoperable fans, dismantled clocks, warped VHS tapes, a flat tire. Mom fought it back like a wildfire, holding the line, watching for drift—for things finding their way to the kitchen counter or the bedroom. She would get firm with him, demand it all migrate back to the barn, and start moving things out herself. Which led to the inevitable eruption of gruesome shouting matches. The cycle repeated itself, year upon year.

•••

As I pass through the hall towards the bedrooms, a loaded moving box weighing down my forearms, the hole in the closet door catches my eye.

I recall with exacting clarity the night it happened.

My older brother, Chris, fifteen at the time, returned home from being out with friends. He disappeared frequently back then, sneaking out through his bedroom window, going missing for days, showing up unexpectedly at odd hours, already drinking heavily and abusing hard drugs. That evening he slunk in through the front door, trying to make his way unnoticed, past where Mom and I sat in the family room watching T.V. But Mom confronted him in the hall, both of them primed for an altercation.

“Look at me,” she demanded, cupping his chin with her palm to turn his face her direction. “You’re high again.”

“No, I’m not,” he retorted, anger seeping from him already.

“Chris, I can tell by looking at your eyes. I know. Don’t lie to me!”

“I told you! I’m not high!” he yelled.

“And I told you not to come home like this!”

And then he burst and started punching the closet door with his bare fist, repeatedly, screaming with each hit, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

My beautiful brother turned into a demonic thing right before my eight-year-old eyes.

No one ever fixed the hole. There isn’t time or reason to now. The buyers take ownership in four days, it will be their problem then.

•••

Mom wanders aimlessly through the house, back hunched, arms dangling at her sides. She loosely grasps a half-formed cardboard box by its flap in her right hand. The box slaps her leg with each shuffle step, dragging along on the floor beside her.

“I don’t know what to do with this,” she mumbles, gesturing to the box. “Do you need it somewhere?”

One step leads down into the house’s sunken, formal living room, situated directly off the front entrance. We approach the built-in bookshelves along the back wall. Mom sits on the brick stoop in front of the fireplace, adjacent to the bookcases. I sit on the floor in front of them and take books off the shelves, one at a time, holding each up for her assessment. Her collection is chockfull of mysteries and biographies, her favorites.

Pulling out the next book, “Black Dahlia?”

“Donate,” she says.

In my youth, the popular novels she’d kept from the 1960s and early 70s intrigued me the most, providing me with a window into a bygone era. Peyton Place. Valley of the Dolls. Fear of Flying. Coffee, Tea or Me. I used to sneak her books off the shelf while she was away at work, read and replace them before she found any missing. Part of the taboo was the content of these books, considered racy during their time. But more important was the fact I didn’t want her to know I had gone into the living room to get them.

We were not supposed to enter the living room.

The living room was an anomaly, the nicest spot in the house. Mom and Dad replaced the room’s green shag with a plush, white carpeting. She’d feared we would sully this pristine new floor with our soiled feet—and she came from an old-fashioned upbringing that believed a formal living room was for entertaining only.

More than just the thick, luxurious carpet and all Mom’s books, the living room was where she kept a globe, a painting of her mother and a formal portrait of Mom, Chris, and me as a baby. There was a full-length couch with matching love seat and a proper coffee table. As a kid, the room seemed so spacious, so beautiful. I wished we were allowed to use it more often.

The problem with saving our best areas for entertaining was that we never had guests. Mom’s side of the family all remained in West Virginia, and although Dad’s family lived locally, none of them spoke with each other, ever. Mom and Dad had no friends, or none outside of work, or at least none who would travel the great expanse to visit us at our home.

•••

The inaugural owners occupied the house for two years, then Mom and Dad bought it in 1980. When my parents acquired the house, it cost $80K. They had $30K to put down from the sale of their place in town. With Dad’s military service, they were able to secure a loan through the VA for the remainder of the purchase price. Today, thirty-four years later, Mom owes $150K on the house. The calculation is incomprehensible.

Decades back, Dad went into business, opening a security firm with an irreputable colleague. Over the years, the firm struggled and Dad’s partner convinced him to put our house up as collateral for another loan. Dad took Mom to the bank to sign the papers without telling her the purpose of the visit, capturing her signature through the element of surprise.

As his partner steadily embezzled money and failed to pay taxes, Dad never questioned the accounting, never saw the books, until the whole operation was on the verge of collapse. Dad’s signature held him accountable and we were assured to lose the house. I was eleven and they didn’t discuss things like this with me directly. But I overheard their arguments.

Mom, yelling, “I can’t believe you did this to us! We are going to lose the house!”

Dad, also yelling, “We’re not going to lose the goddamn house!”

That was the language they used. “Lose the house.” Lost—like a set of car keys, or losing a sock. Abrupt. One day the keys are in hand, and the next, lost. As a kid, I tried to imagine what it would look like, when we “lost” the house. Would it be like the time our mini-van got repossessed? When Dad drove it to work and came out to find it missing? One moment it was ours, and the next, gone forever.

Would it happen quick, like a fire, enabling us to take only what we could grab in that moment? A favorite dress and whatever book I happened to be reading? Or would we know they were coming, like a scheduled appointment?

I worried that when the time came, I wouldn’t be allowed to stay with my parents any more. That they would be seen as officially unfit. I tried to prepare myself.

One Saturday afternoon, Mom and I wandered through the mall. Even as a kid, I understood shopping was Mom’s addiction, her way to deal with Dad and Chris and life. The mall allowed us a neutral setting where we could experience happiness, at least for a moment. It felt safer for me to broach sensitive topics there.

Mom stopped to peruse a blouse, folded neatly on a display table. I watched her face for the moment of transition, the split second between when her attention was freed from the merchandise but before we marched onward to the next item. When the instant arrived, using clear inflection, low volume, I broke out my rehearsed inquiry, “Mom, if they take our house away, will they take me away from you and Dad?”

“What?” her voice terse, my words breaking her shopping-induced reverie. She did not make eye contact, but her annoyance with me was evident for thinking this, for saying these words out loud, in public, where other people might hear them. “Of course not,” she hissed. “Look at all those kids who end up living with their parents in cars.”

I tried to envision it. The four of us cramming into some used car for the night, like something out of an afterschool special. For what it was worth, I found consolation in her response. My bedroom might be taken from me, but my family would not be.

Armed with this new information, I waited for the day we would “lose the house.”

•••

With forty-eight hours remaining until moving day, I walk into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and some yogurt. Mom stands at the kitchen sink, dishrag in hand, crying. I approach her from the side, invoking my most soothing tone, “Are you feeling sad about the move?” It seems an obvious question, but she’s been pining to leave for decades.

“Yes, this is my house. I have a house, and I’m moving to that … that stupid condo. I’ve lived here for thirty-four years,” she replies.

“I know, it’s a big change,” I say,” What’ve been some of your best memories here?” More than just changing the conversation to something positive, I am legitimately curious what she is going to miss.

“Well, there’s a lot of good memories,” she sniffs, “Like, when we took you and Chris to Disneyland.”

For me, the irony is immediate. Her fondest memories of the house are when we were away from it.

“Yeah, that was a fun trip,” I concede. “And we did make it to Disneyland two times.”

“We did?”

I guess she blocked out the second excursion. I don’t blame her. The first time, when I was seven and Chris fourteen, we drove in Dad’s old pick-up truck all the way down I-5 from Oregon to Southern California. Mom and Dad up front in the cab, Chris and I riding in the truck bed, under the canopy, sitting on foam mats. We visited the Magic Kingdom, enjoying the Pirates of the Caribbean and It’s a Small World, eating cheeseburgers in restaurants, our one true family vacation.

But the night before the second trip, just two years later, Chris ran away from home again after a verbal brawl with Dad. My parents debated whether to cancel the trip. Since they had taken leave from work and made all the arrangements—a rarity for them—they decided the three of us would depart as scheduled.

Upon our return, we found the family room window shattered, the house in disarray. Apparently, Chris did not have his house key. He and his friends broke in while we were away, searching for things they could sell for drug money. His friends stole several of Dad’s guns and Chris pilfered whatever cash Mom tried to keep hidden for emergencies, ransacking her personal drawers. When I try to summon memories from that second outing to Disneyland, all I see is broken glass littering the family room carpet.

Standing there with Mom in the kitchen, reminiscing about the few positive moments she conjured up, I mentally search for heart-warming reflections of my own contained within these four walls.

My real joy in the house came from the studio. In Mom’s younger years, she pursued dance as a professional career. Once she had us kids, she wanted to continue her dance career as a teacher. Mom had a conversation with Dad and asked him if his job was secure, if it could support the family while she launched her dance studio. He replied yes, in full confidence. Then he reconstructed the garage at Killins Loop into Becky’s Dance and Exercise Studio. He bricked over the garage door into a solid façade, sprung the floor and lined the walls with barres and mirrors.

Mom opened for students and six months later Dad was fired from his job for stealing. He could not stop himself from bringing things home, amassing more, piling up his hoard, regardless of where or how he obtained these things.

Needing a reliable paycheck, Mom eventually shuttered her business, but the physical studio remained, an homage to her unfulfilled dreams. Over the years it inevitably became a glorified storage room, but I always kept enough of the floor cleared to dance.

I hated Dad’s mess and his instability. I hated Mom’s regimented rules. I hated my brother’s intoxicated anger. I hated being so alone all the time. Too far to walk or bike to anything as a kid. I took it all out in that studio. In the endless monotony of summer, with nowhere to go and no way to get there, sometimes I exercised up to four hours at a time. Finding my solace through movement and music and endorphins. Waiting for the day when I could finally leave it all behind.

•••

Night falls on our last evening with the house, my childhood home.

I stand alone in the doorway of the darkened laundry room and look at the emptied dining room through to the kitchen and the family room. Thinking back on all our memories, wondering if, after thirty-four years, our family’s unhappiness has taken on a life of its own that will haunt this space once we leave.

Earlier today Mom and I took a break from chores and went for a short walk down our country road. As we meandered, the omnipresent, low-slung cloud cover parted, revealing Mt. Hood’s noble peak. Realizing I never found out how we managed to keep the house, I used this opportunity to ask.

“Oh, we were going to lose it,” she tells me with certainty. “We had to make a minimum payment of ten thousand dollars right away or it was gone. There was no way we had that. I was preparing for us to leave. But then, at the last minute, Aunt Ruth sent me a check for it.”

The knowledge settles with me. “So, she’s the reason we could stay.”

“And then, we were just broke,” Mom continues. “After paying the IRS on the back taxes each month, the double house payments, we had nothing left, and I was working two and three jobs. Trying to catch up.”

This part of our story, I remember well.

Staring now into the darkness of the house, my viewpoint shifts. I understand, viscerally, with the perspective of adulthood, how hard my mom fought to keep this place, for us.

What she did was remarkable.

Mom and her sister did not finish high school. Their lives were plagued by turbulence and upheaval, never having enough stability to establish a rhythm to their schooling or to develop close friendships with other children.

Mom recalls instances in her youth of waking up in basement apartments, the floor flooded to her ankles, or life in sweltering attic units where her father could not stand erect. Because of her own father’s addictions and abuse, she wanted things for me that had never been afforded to her. Compared to the poverty she grew up in, our home on Killins Loop was palatial, and I, its beneficiary.

This house provided me with the foundation to finish high school, to be the first in the family to graduate college. As much as I had hated it, this house provided me with a stable platform to spring forth into the world and find my way.

•••

The realtor told us we could just leave our house keys on the kitchen counter and be out by the afternoon. But I burned with curiosity—who were these people that would occupy the space that had occupied me for so long? We arranged to hand over the keys to the new owners in person.

There is no logical place for us to wait for them. It is not really our house any more. This moment exists in a vortex, no longer part of our old life, the life that contained Killins Loop, and the new lives not yet created.

On this early September afternoon, simply remaining outside is most comfortable. The three of us—my mom, my husband and me—take a seat on the front concrete step.

The house never looked as good as it does today. The sun shines warm and inviting, not as overly intense as in the summer months. The sweet odor of freshly mowed lawn floats on the breeze and the branches of the apple tree hang heavy with Gravensteins. Mom swept the front porch, the sidewalk, and her window washings make the front of the house sparkle.

“What time is it?” Mom asks.

“5:05,” I reply.

“They’re late,” she says.

Another five minutes creep by before we notice a turquoise mini-van approach. This must be them. No other cars have driven by since we’ve been outside. The three of us stand with expectancy.

As the van pulls into the gravel driveway, I try to catch a glimpse, a precursor, of who is inside. After endless seconds, a clean-cut man in khaki pants and a woman wearing a sun dress, both in their early thirties, emerge. I spot a small face press up against the back window. The woman slides open the passenger side door and a jumble of little limbs and torsos, attached to four hearty children, tumble out.

We walk towards each other. Mom appears small, timid. She extends her hand to them, “I’m Becky,” she says.

The woman smiles with compassion and takes Mom’s hand in both of hers. “I’m Susan,” she says. “Is this your house?” She seems genuinely interested to meet Mom, as if she is grateful to her for this new home.

“Yes,” Mom replies, tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

Susan turns to the man beside her. “This is my husband, Dan, and we just love your house. We are so thankful. This will be our first house. Oh, and these—” she gestures to the four kids who appear to range in age from three to eleven, who brim with uncontainable enthusiasm, and who have already begun chasing each other around the front yard—“are Elizabeth, Stephanie, Jennifer and Jacob. He’s our youngest.”

We smile in acknowledgment and finish our introductions. We learn Susan and Dan are both schoolteachers. Their delight over having room for their children to play is demonstrable. They already talk about planting a garden.

“Can we walk through the house together?” Susan asks. Although the invitation is directed mostly to my mom, her offer provides me a needed moment of closure.

As the five of us enter the house, the kids run to catch up. They barrel through the front door and from the cramped interior hallway, drop down into the sunken living room. All four of them skipping in circles, unfettered, through the empty room, nimble feet on white carpet. I wonder how this family will use the living room. The children are so natural in the space, so joyful. As the eldest girl clasps the young boy’s hand, I pray for them. That they will gather in here, play games together, eat popcorn on couches, laugh with each other here, love each other here.

•••

MELISSENT ZUMWALT is an artist, advocate and administrator who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her written work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Whisk(e)y Tit Journal, Full Grown People, Oregon Humanities’ Beyond the Margins, Sisyphus, Pithead Chapel and elsewhere. She learned the art of storytelling from her mother, a woman who has an uncanny ability to recount the most ridiculous and tragic moments of life with beauty and humor. Read more at melissentzumwalt.com.

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Weird Loud Smelly World

Photo by Gina Easley

By Jody Mace

When I was around nine, I used to practice being blind. It was a strange practice but not totally far-fetched. I had worn glasses for near-sightedness since I was six, and my vision was already terrible. If I’d lived in a different age I probably would have already accidentally walked off a cliff by then. I practiced being blind by walking slowly around the house, blindfolded, my fingers trailing along the walls and doors. I’d get a box of Cocoa Pebbles from the pantry, pour it into a bowl, and top it with milk from the refrigerator. The important things. I’d play piano, trying to memorize my favorite songs, training my fingers’ muscle memory, so that the spacing between the keys was second nature.

I was completely confident that with adequate preparation I could adjust when I went blind and do fine, at least in the practical sense. But the part that really terrified me was just the idea of not seeing anything anymore. When out of my blindfold, I’d look around and try to memorize what things looked like so that when the inevitable darkness came, I’d at least have something to look at in my imagination. Otherwise, no more light, no more moon, no more colors, no more faces.

•••

I’m on a plane heading west. We’re over one of those states that I can never remember, one of the middle states. It might start with a vowel. I know that there are people who live down there but it’s almost impossible for me to hold that thought as a reality in my brain. When I’m on the ground and a plane passes overhead it’s the same thing.

Child development books talk about “object impermanence,” where babies under a certain age don’t understand that something exists if they don’t see it. Out of sight, out of mind. I guess that’s why peek-a-boo is continually exciting for them. It doesn’t take much.

It’s the same thing with adults in a way, though. Down there someone is in the grocery store deciding what kind of cheese to buy. Someone is practicing chords on a guitar. Someone’s teenage daughter just told her that she hates her.

As an exercise in compassion I try to picture these people down in that unspecified state and contemplate their humanity. But it’s too crowded a picture in my mind. The composition of the picture is stressful and chaotic, like a Where’s Waldo book. All those tiny people with their lives. They’re all talking over each other and I can’t handle hearing about all their problems, not all at once.

There’s an actual real, full-sized human behind me who’s been coughing this whole flight and I don’t care about him at all. Maybe it’s just allergies. Or maybe it’s emphysema, which is horrible, but in either of these cases his spittle is no danger to me at all. Or maybe he is contagious, but he’s on the plane because he’s going somewhere important and heartbreaking like a funeral. But I don’t care. I just want him to stop coughing. He should have taken a cough suppressant before he got on the plane. What kind of self-centered monster flies across the country hacking up the whole time?

Even though the guy on the plane is all too real to me, I don’t have any more compassion for him than I do for the theoretical people on the ground. I don’t want to think about what it’s like to be him right now. I can see him but I don’t really see him. It’s a myopia of the heart.

•••

My next-door neighbor works in security in Afghanistan. He’s over there for three or four months at a time and then he’s home for two weeks. Usually, the day after he gets home he knocks on my door and says he’s thinking of having “a little something for the kids” and is that okay with me?

I tell him of course it is, even though I know how it will go. The little thing ends up being a big party. Friends and relatives come and go all weekend. The music goes until late at night. He rents an inflatable water slide as tall as the house and puts it in the front yard. After the party there will be a couple of stray socks that have been carried by the temporary river and settled on the ground next to our trashcan.

I read about the party on Nextdoor. “Where’s that loud music coming from?” Consensus is that it’s a big problem. But what I know, and the complainers don’t, is that he’s been putting himself at risk and has been away from his friends and family for months. As far as I’m concerned, he can do whatever he wants, even if it’s a little bit too loud.

Somehow, we’ve gotten this idea that we have a right to never be disturbed by other people, to never be offended.

I understand wanting it to be quiet. I appreciate peaceful nights too. But, lately, and maybe it’s partly because my house is quieter since my kids grew up and moved out, I’m craving connection more than quiet. I want to know more about my neighbors. Sometimes it seems strange to be in such close proximity to so many people and know so little about them.

•••

We’re driving past Asheville, North Carolina, on our way home from a visit with relatives, and decide to stop there because a jazz fusion trio that we like is playing at a free, outdoor festival. The band is fronted by a steel drum player.

Asheville is a weird place. Sometimes I wonder if they embrace their weirdness a little bit too adamantly, and if it’s become contrived, just a marketing slogan. “Keep Asheville Weird.”

But on the other hand, it really is pretty weird.

Case in point: as the trio played, lurking backstage is someone wearing a Big Foot costume, holding a saxophone. We can see him there for a whole song, poised to come on stage.

Finally, he does, and it’s a surprise to the band. It turns out that he’s pretty well-known in Asheville. He goes by the name Saxsquatch. He’s got a Facebook page and everything. He randomly shows up at events and sits in with bands, apparently with no warning.

He’s a good saxophone player, although I can see that it’s a bit of a challenge to communicate with him. The steel drum player seems to try to tell him that the bass player is going to take a solo. He says something in the direction of Saxsquatch’s giant head, and pokes his big hairy arm with his sticks, but there’s no stopping Saxsquatch. He throws his head back and wails on that thing.

As the band’s been playing, the crowd has grown and it’s become more diverse. White, black, young hipsters, aging hippies. An older man who looks like he walked straight out of a holler is up front, clogging. It’s like he’s listening to a different band that’s playing some kind of old-time Appalachian mountain music, but on the other hand, maybe he’s hearing this inventive fusion band just as it should be heard and is adding his own chapter to its story. A young guy right in front of me gyrates with a hula hoop. He looks like it’s been a while since he wasn’t stoned and smells like it’s been even longer since he took a shower.

At first whiff, I’m annoyed, but he’s part of this scene too. He’s adding his own voice to this epic conversation. The sights and sounds and smells, even the ones that are a little messy, a little loud, a little rank, remind us that we’re part of a community of people. We’re not alone.

We’re all mysteries. Doctors can look at our brains with an MRI and can see the structures—the temporal lobes, the parietal lobes, the cerebellum, the thalamus, the hippocampus. Scientists have imaging technology that can reveal brain activity in those areas. But our actual memories and thoughts, the things we love, our fears, our hopes—although they’re stored in our brains, they’re all invisible. The only way we know anything about each other is through the stories that we tell. If we’re really listening to each other then we can’t divide people into us or them. But we have to decide if we’re ready to see other people, all people, as human. Because once we do, we can’t turn our heads away any longer.

I had one thing right when I was nine. The darkness is inevitable, one way or another, and until it comes I want to see everything I can.

The band’s telling its story through melodies and rhythms that twist around each other like a grapevine. Saxsquatch tells his story with his saxophone and with his mysterious arrival at the show. The drummer plays his solo with impossible speed, rising in intensity until he jumps an inch from the stool at the end, as if he levitated, as if, for a second, gravity was distracted by the story he was telling with his sticks.

Listen:

I want to hear your story. Even if you’ve told me before, I want to hear it again. I want to smell the burgers on your grill next door, even if I’m not invited to your party. When I walk into your kitchen I want to smell the curry you cooked, the ghost of your dinner. When you pull up next to me at a red light and the bass is thumping, I want to see you moving to the sounds, lost in the song. I want you to tell me about your tattoo. I want to sit across from you and your friend on the train and hear you speaking Spanish, Arabic, Lao. I want your drum solo to go on a little too long. Tell me your story. I’m going to try to listen.

•••

JODY MACE is a freelance writer living in North Carolina. Her essays have appeared in O Magazine, Brain, Child, The Washington Post, and many other publications, as well as several anthologies. Her website is jodymace.com. She publishes the website Charlotte on the Cheap in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People.

 

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Blueberry Season

Photo by University of Delaware Carvel REC/Flickr

By Patrice Gopo

My youngest daughter tilts her head up at me as I buckle her into her car seat. She asks, “Can we go pick blueberries?”

I think, There is no blueberry season in Charlotte.

Her request comes just a week or two after our Charlotte strawberry-picking season. She recalls how I took her and her older sister to a farm flush with rows of low strawberry bushes. She tangled her fingers in the leaves and thin branches and found fruit the color of rubies. We later gathered around the kitchen table and lingered over strawberries rinsed in a colander. We discarded stems and mashed fresh fruit in our mouths. On the heels of the late-spring strawberry season and prior to the mid-summer descent of peach season and well before the tangy tart of apple season—when we leave Charlotte and drive two hours to the mountains for the day and pull ripe apples from a lush and giving orchard—my daughter says she wants blueberries.

“Too hot,” I tell her as I consider everything I’ve ever heard about blueberries, how they need cooler northern climates and mild summers. Charlotte is too hot in the summer for blueberries—and for me too if I consider the weight of the summer rays, the thick humidity that clenches the air, and the sweat beading around my hairline and dripping down my back. The air conditioner inside my home calls to me like a pied piper. I respond without protest.

“We need to go to Alaska,” I say to my girl. “We need to travel to a place with a real winter.” I think of Anchorage, where I come from, the city I left twenty years ago.

“Will we drive?” she asks me from the back seat as we join the traffic on familiar Charlotte roads and pass storefronts I’ve seen each day for six and a half years.

“Yes,” I tell her and catch her eye in the rearview mirror. “We’ll drive to Alaska, and we’ll pick blueberries.” Waves of my imagination roll over me, and I plan how we’ll drive days home to Alaska and fill our plastic pails with mounds of violet fruit. For the few moments I have the attention of a preschooler, together she and I dream. I plant a story of a long, winding road trip across the country, along the coast of Canada, and into Alaska, all in search of berries I think we can’t pick here in Charlotte.

This is my seventh summer in Charlotte. Six and a half years now in a city I thought might be a passing-through home. But my husband, my girls, and I, we are still here—beginning our seventh summer. Seven. The days of creation, the colors in a rainbow, the number of completion. Is seven also the number of years that signifies Charlotte is now the foundation for my family’s life?

Many summers ago, when I was a child in Alaska, my parents, my sister, and I collected pails of high-bush blueberries from first the slope of a mountain and then later the valley close by. We hiked into the hills near Anchorage and plucked the jewels that clung near tiny leaves, handfuls plopping in the bucket and at least as many more bursting in my mouth.

“Blueberry jam,” my mother declared, and she used a recipe a friend with extensive Alaskan roots had given our transplanted family. A recipe to boil the berries, stir in cups of granulated sugar and other ingredients I can’t recall. We set a row of jelly jars across the kitchen countertop and inhaled the fragrance of syrupy sweet. My mother poured the deep violet jam into each jar, and my sister and I helped tighten the lids. We used black permanent markers to write down the date and lined the pantry with jars of homemade blueberry jam. For the next few months whenever we wanted jam with warm slices of toast or paired with peanut butter sandwiches—perhaps all the way until that spring—we drew jars of jam from the pantry, unscrewed the lid, and remembered the slope of a mountain and the taste of fresh blueberries.

My mother is planning to leave my hometown of Anchorage and move to my Charlotte neighborhood. My father left when my parents’ marriage ended years ago, but my mother stayed and has remained now for forty-three winters of navigating ice-caked roads. And forty-three summers in mild weather offering just enough respite from the snow. My mother wants to be near her granddaughters. She wants them to come spend weekends with her and visit her on sweltering summer days. My mother has never spent a full summer in Charlotte, but soon she will. Sometimes in the midst of the Charlotte summer, when the heat bears down with an even greater intensity, I think of my Anchorage mountains. I think of temperatures ten, twenty, thirty degrees cooler. I think of days perfect for the flourishing of wild Alaskan blueberries—and overcast heavens spilling forth the crisp comfort of home.

•••

On the phone, on an ordinary day this summer, my mother tells me that she will put her house on the market in autumn, that she will pack her possessions, leave Alaska, and create a home down the road from me in Charlotte. The distance between my family and her will compress to mere streets, to a number of houses between, no longer the stuff of a thousand miles thrice over. I know these happenings usher in a time of the beauty of generations entwined, but I taste a slight bitterness in my mouth and the words slow.

“Wow. It’s sad,” I say when I think of her home sold and the way I’ll no longer be able to tell people my mother lives in Alaska.

My mother echoes my words. “It is sad,” she replies and there is a long pause in our conversation.

My daughters play down the road at a summer camp, running around a playground, sucking on ice popsicles, and living the lazy days as I once did far away in Anchorage. I stand in my garage, preparing to leave to go pick them up from a day of fun. My mother is coming to us. Next year she may be preparing to go pick up her granddaughters from a day at camp, bring them back to her house, and watch them create imaginary games at the edge of the woods in her new back yard. As I drive the couple of miles down the road, I recall my mother’s back deck and the mountains the color of blueberries in the distance and the way we were living like Alaska would always be home. I have gorged myself on the reality of a life rooted somewhere. Even as I’ve left Alaska, my mother’s presence there allows me to taste these ties to a familiar place. And with my mother’s words, with the few months left, I find the flavor I long to hold beginning to evaporate into nothing but memories.

I pull into the camp parking lot and pause a moment to glance at the height of the surrounding trees and the expanse of the manicured lawn. The months ahead will bring with it laughter and long hugs, shared meals and creation of the future—something new to alleviate the weight of the loss of my childhood home pressing against my chest but perhaps never dissipating.

•••

Days after I speak with my mother, my family and I spend a Saturday a few hours from Charlotte. We pass the afternoon on a farm on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, sipping cold drinks, seated on stools in an open-air tea house void of walls, windows, and doors. In each direction we turn, we spy plants and shrubs used in this eco-friendly business. Lavender and jasmine. Hyssop and hibiscus too. A couple of hummingbirds hover near a clump of leaves, their wings a blur. Bees buzz around, and I envision raw honey sold in canning jars. When I purchase my glass of lavender lemonade, I spot a sign that reads, PICK BLUEBERRIES HERE.

Blueberries? Here on this plot of land lit with summer heat, never knowing the chill of real winter cold? The girls and I wander past picnic benches and a makeshift playground to rows and rows and rows of blueberry bushes. We pluck the berries and begin to fill a quart-size crate to brimming, working steadily in the shade of a few trees, stripping each bush of its bounty. My girls want to move further down the row, but I keep us in the shade, the brute sun sure to transform the fun of berry picking into absolute drudgery. After we fill our quart and before we wander back to the tea house replete with spinning fans and cups of ice water, I take a photo of my youngest holding the cardboard container of berries. We stand not on the slope of a mountain, but instead on this flat patch of ground beneath a grove of trees.

“We didn’t have to drive all the way to Alaska,” I tell my daughter as she poses with her blueish-purple treasure. Here, just a few hours from our home, the blueberries grow in quantity enough to satiate and satisfy.

•••

PATRICE GOPO is a 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow. She is the author of All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way (August 2018), an essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging. She lives with her family in North Carolina.

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The Wicked Stink

Photo by James St. John/Flickr

By Larissa Kosmos

The smelly ordeal was almost over. Holding the trash bag, I stood inside the front door of our small apartment, peering through the peephole. I waited for our neighbor Gladys, the friendly older woman who lived across the hall, who was working her key in the lock, to disappear. I didn’t want her—or any of the neighbors on our four-unit floor—catching me with this particular bag of garbage. The stench of it was embarrassing. I would’ve felt obligated to explain. And it would not have been a brief explanation. I’d have said that we’d eaten fish for dinner and that Jim, my husband, had dropped its moist packaging—the white wrapping paper and Styrofoam tray—into the trash without first sealing these items in a separate bag.

But saying that much merely prefaced our story of stink. It wouldn’t have justified the intensity of the odor, so naturally, I would’ve been forced to admit that the fish dinner was several nights earlier. Of course, this revelation would’ve raised judgmental eyebrows and prompted the obvious question: Why hadn’t we taken the garbage out sooner? Dominoes.

This story makes sense only if I back up to its very beginning:

Every week of our life in New York City, we walked our daughter and son to school and later, we walked them home. My husband moved the car for street cleaning; when the street was cleaned, he parked it; three days later, he did the parking cha-cha again. I bought food at the store; I took food out of the fridge; I did things to make the food edible; what was left of the food I put away. Over and over.

Not much happened to alter these rhythms. After working, figuring out which mail to read or ignore, helping with homework, and hunting down beloved, wayward blankies, neither of us had the capacity to plot a political demonstration or found a charity. And we didn’t get invited to swanky social events. The parties we attended began at two o’clock on Sunday afternoons with colorful balloons and our children’s friends as the guests of honor.

Hence, once in a while, to make things interesting, we invited a distraction: A day after a nice family dinner, when Jim and I realized that the fish packaging in the trash was beginning to smell, we tacitly established a game that consisted of tolerating the odor. Taking out the kitchen garbage—it was understood—meant defeat. It would be a match of endurance, one that would separate the human from the superhero.

Well, I love a challenge. Besides, the smell was lousy, but not terrible. As I lifted the lid to dispose of one thing or another, I’d wince at the pungent fumes, but I’m no wimp, and I was determined to outlast my husband.

We’re both freelancers who work from home—he is a videographer and film editor, I’m a writer—so we were equally exposed to the fish stink. Jim worked at the desk in our bedroom as usual, headphones on, plugged into his computer, piecing together footage, seemingly unfazed by this test of strength. I was down the hall, seated with my laptop at the dining table, our kids’ cereal crumbs on the placemats and on the floor beneath my feet, trying to think of something worthwhile to write.

Meanwhile, trapped under the lid of our garbage can, the odor grew increasingly foul. To clarify, there was not one bit of fish flesh in the trash. The smell rose from the wetness which had seeped through the white packing paper. (What was this moisture? A wee puddle of the ocean? A splash from the bucket that held the doomed tilapia on the deck of a fishing boat?)

Ironically, in a see-through plastic box in the fridge, the leftover baked tilapia reclined with a polite lack of smell, which befitted this type of fish. Tilapia. You hear promise in that name. Unlike mackerel, which is sneaky, or tuna, which is dim, or sea bass, which is pretentious, tilapia is friendly and bright. Well, apparently we had entangled ourselves with a gang of tilapia—angry outcasts—which had launched post-mortem revenge on us, its consumers.

After a couple of days, I had to hold my breath when lifting the trash lid and devise strategies for coping with the stench. For example, to minimize the number of times I opened the garbage, especially while making dinner, I clustered items on the counter to dispose of all at once—an onion peel, the wrapping of ground beef, a tomato stem, an empty sour cream container. Like some sort of forest animal, I scrapped together little piles.

As opponents, Jim and I didn’t discuss strategy, but I noticed that he would open the can as narrowly as possible to deposit something and then flee the kitchen. I often dashed out, too, because the smell had gained a staying power. Bursts of fish stink piggybacked on air molecules.

Complaining would be an admission of weakness—Jim and I both knew it—so we remained mum. Our kids, however, did not hide their reactions. Infusing her every word with drama, my seven-year-old daughter demanded, “What’s that awful smell?” My son, then four, was diplomatic, as if he were breaking bad news. “That garbage smell is not good, Mom,” he said, adding, “I think I’m allergic to it.”

The odor had become rancid, but still, I would not break down and take out the trash. I had the fortitude of a samurai warrior. (Apparently, so did my husband.) Instead, I found more ways to manage. One afternoon I brewed coffee, knowing its aroma would fill the kitchen, at least for a short while. Later, it occurred to me that dumping the wet coffee grounds on top of the fish odor might suppress it. To bolster the stink-quashing mission, I deployed my orange peel into the garbage.

Well, this strategy backfired. The fish juice got angry and retaliated with a more noxious smell. It was unimaginably bad. Putrid. If you bottled this horror, you could use it to disperse crazy mobs or elicit confessions from high-ranking Russian spies.

Yet my husband and I were unflinching in our game. Each of us wanted the satisfaction of prevailing over the other, so we kept this festering abomination in our home. Although I tried not to show it, the stink was making me cranky. (Couldn’t we amuse ourselves like normal couples did by watching a reality series or a crime show?)

Now several days since our civilized tilapia dinner, the smell emanated from the garbage even when it was closed. I couldn’t stand to open it any more. After giving each of our kids a yogurt, I walked the foil lids over to the wastebasket in the bathroom. I would go out of my way to dispose of a tissue. When traveling around the apartment with rubbish in hand proved impractical, I set a plastic grocery bag for trash collection atop the kitchen can.

One morning, when the kids were in school, the wicked stink found me in the living room where I was trying to write. I was distracted to the point of being annoyed. Smelly fish cells had crowded my brain cells. Finally, I couldn’t take it any more—the odor, the silence, everything.

“Did you open the garbage?” I shouted to Jim down the hallway.

“About half an hour ago,” he replied.

Enough. Dead fish gas was destroying our oxygen. Decidedly, I pushed back my chair, marched down to our bedroom, and stood at the desk until Jim noticed and removed his headphones.

“How long can we go on like this?” I demanded, desperate for the game to end.

He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about.

“The garbage,” I said impatiently. For crying out loud, what else would I be referring to? “That god-awful smell.”

“It just smells like garbage.” Oddly, it sounded as if he meant what he said. “When the bag is full, we’ll empty it.”

At this bizarre moment, looking at the alien imposter who perfectly resembled my husband of ten years, I might have blurted “What?!” Or maybe it was, “Are you kidding me?!” Whatever the words, they did not adequately express my shock.

As he reiterated his message, I could not orient myself in the new reality, having believed—for days—that we were engaged in an olfactory nerve wrestle. Weren’t we?

“No.” The Jim-looking alien shook his head and, after listening to all I said, replaced his headphones.

Stunned, weirdly disappointed, I made an about-face toward the kitchen. For the record, not participating in the game is not the same as winning the game. My husband is not a superhero. In fact, there is obviously something wrong with him—he must have a damaged sense of smell.

Holding my breath, I popped up the lid, lifted the bag, and tied it tight. Very tight. Avoiding having to explain why my garbage smells the way it does—some things are nobody else’s business—I watched through the peephole, waiting until Gladys entered her apartment and until there was, without a doubt, no movement near the doors of our other three neighbors, before stepping out and pressing the elevator button.

Riding eight floors down to the basement, alone, I clenched the top of the bag in case the criminal smell tried to escape. In the garbage room, I dropped it into one of the ten large pails lined with black industrial-strength bags. Game over.

Back in the apartment, I opened the trash receptacle, spritzed inside with grapefruit-scented cleaning solution, wiped around, and left the lid propped so air could enter. With the cheerful-smelling spray, I also scrubbed the counters. Then I vigorously mopped the floor. You’d think my kitchen had been the site of a heinous crime. (Out, damned stink! Out, I say!)

Finally, after washing my hands, I opened the fridge and faced it—the remaining tilapia, which had been keeping up the innocent act and which, over the last few days, we hadn’t had a taste for at lunchtime (surprise, surprise). I slapped a piece of masking tape on the clear plastic lid, I.D.-ed the contents with black marker, opened the freezer, and—without remorse—I put that tilapia away.

Its slick white flesh, moist and delicate, would contract in the arctic surroundings, and with every passing hour, as I continued with my comings and goings and this-and-that-ings, it would grow increasingly cold and hard, eventually gathering a coat of white frost, with the see-through lid resembling the windshield of a car left outdoors in a blizzard. It got what it deserved. I, meanwhile, could reclaim my kitchen, return to my writing, and forget about that fish for a long, long time.

•••

LARISSA KOSMOS’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Women’s Health, Real Simple, Cleveland Magazine, on Babble and elsewhere. She now lives in Cleveland, where she works as a writing consultant at Cuyahoga Community College and waits impatiently for half a year of winter to pass. Find more of her work at www.larissakosmos.com

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Driving Home

Photo by Gina Easley

By Dana Salvador

As I slipped away from the city lights on the four-lane highway, the land opened up like a collapsible box. The sides, filled with trees and undulating rises, slowly flattened to make room for the prairie, the sky as wide as intention. In my beat-up Riviera, I drove towards our abandoned farmhouse, suffering from nostomania, an irresistible compulsion to return home.

The ache for my family and our farm—torn apart by my father—radiated through my body. After twenty-eight years of marriage, my father walked through our farmhouse, took his clothes from the closet, and left—an action so out of character that over twenty years later I still struggle to reconcile the man I thought he was with this moment. I’ve no idea how long my father cheated on my mother before he moved in with his mistress, four miles away. The veil of secrecy my parents created about their marriage, and the deceit my father displayed leaves the events of my memory out of focus, a grainy film that never uses the correct camera angle.

After my father left, and my mother was uprooted, I walked through campus as if a piece of bailing wire were tied to my breastbone. Suddenly something pulled the wire taut, and I’d drive away from Greeley, Colorado—the ugly stepchild of the Front Range where I attended college—to the prairie. I could be eating a bagel for dinner, studying at a coffee shop, or talking to a friend on the phone and a moment later find myself in my car headed east to an empty house.

On this particular night in the fall of 1998, it was almost ten, and I had classes in the morning. I knew it was dangerous for a woman to drive alone down deserted roads—a flat tire would mean I’d spend the night in my car waiting for enough daylight to change it and risk who might stop to help. I also knew if I drove fast, I could make it to the farm in two and a half hours. Usually people drive as quickly as they can through the prairie. They want to get somewhere. I drove the speed limit to take my time.

These moments are the impulse of youth, the moments I fear for my young twin sons who I hope never have to make such pilgrimages to their childhood home. Somehow, back then, part of me felt that if I returned, even for a few hours, I might make the divorce, the abandonment less real, that my presence could conjure my family’s existence. But maybe I just wanted to float out to the deepest part of my sorrow and wallow.

While I’d lived in Greeley attending college for several years, I hadn’t adjusted to the horizon obscured by houses and businesses, the streetlights and traffic, the fast talkers and strangers living on the other side of the wall of my apartment. The house became a Siren, something I couldn’t pull myself away from. I traveled the prairie like an ocean.

•••

Houses nestled next to the road became less and less frequent. Sweet grass grew in wisps like cats’ tails around the posts of barbed wire fences. Purple thistle filled pastures on either side of the road. In the moon’s white-gold glow, clumps of yucca and sagebrush gleamed like forgotten glass ornaments fallen off covered wagons years ago.

Occasionally, I passed iron gates with family brands and cattle guards marking the entrance to large ranches. The gravel driveways led to houses, outbuildings, and barns far enough off the highway to be covered in darkness. I imagined the people in these houses asleep in front of the TV or in bed, curled up like kittens beside each other, just like my own family is now if someone were to drive by our stucco house in Albuquerque.

On the interstate, a stream of headlights greeted me heading in the opposite direction, towards Denver. The farther east I drove, the more traffic thinned. I passed Ft. Morgan as steam billowed from the two concrete columns on the south side of the interstate. I breathed the decayed fumes from the beet processing plant, a smell as stale as dog breath.

After fifteen miles, I took the Yuma exit and followed the two-lane road. I thought about turning around, heading back, but there was nothing waiting for me in Greeley, either.

•••

Wide stretches of pastureland lined the highway. Every few miles, at an intersection, I saw mailboxes. Some sat on top of fence posts like ours at home. Others rested on homemade wrought-iron stands. Yard lights dotted the countryside. I saw few cars. I knew my friends from college, all city girls, would be nervous driving for miles without seeing another car. The isolation comforted me. There are times now, living in Albuquerque, when I still long for this isolation, for space around me and for the comfort of solitude.

In sixty miles, I passed through two small towns, each only a few blocks long. Clustered streetlights glowed like a lighthouse miles before I approach the town. Pickups lined the main street outside the local bar. In Yuma, at one of three stoplights, I turned north onto Highway 59.

I rolled down the window; the cold air smelled like plowed fields. Short blades of green wheat sprouted out of dark soil near the edge of the road. Once in a while, I spotted evergreen windbreaks. Some sheltered foundations of houses that fell apart years ago.

Highways in the country are narrow; few allow for a shoulder. Reflectors, paced every hundred yards or so, lead the way. I watched for deer. Almost everyone I know has hit a deer or had a close call. I’ve been taught never to swerve. It’s better to pump the brakes, take the blow—swerving might cause the car to slide into the ditch, flip. Maybe that’s what these late night drives were about: facing the hurt head on.

After twenty-five miles on asphalt, I reached Clarkville, an abandoned community.

Thistles and sunflowers grew waist high around the two remaining buildings. White paint peeled and cracked on the siding of the church and left boards exposed to the harsh sun, the cold winters. Maybe it’s all changed now. Maybe the church collapsed. Maybe the trailer’s gone.

I left the solid feel of pavement underneath the tires and turned onto gravel roads.

•••

As I drove closer to home, stories attached themselves to places void of meaning for most: the corner where my brother and sister wrecked their car, putting both of them in the hospital; the airstrip on the edge of a field where Mr. Hadler landed his spray plane in the summer; the old Holcomb place where the bus picked up children for several years and then one day the family disappeared, blown like chaff to far away places. Their house, like so many houses in this area, still stands empty.

Even though it was one in the morning, I worried about seeing another vehicle on the narrow gravel road. I might meet someone checking cows or getting home late from the bars. Great-uncles and aunts, countless cousins and neighbors will recognize my car. They’ll tell my dad or my grandparents they saw me. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want my grandparents, who live just four miles away from our house, to worry about me driving so far alone at night. I didn’t want my dad to call me. If they found out, I’d lie. I’d tell them I forgot something I needed, which wouldn’t be as much of a lie as intended.

Eventually, I saw three silver bins like metal cairns on the left hand side of the road. I’d reached our field.

•••

Rounding the corner, my chest swelled. I knew every inch of this mile. I ran on this road when I was in high school and the past two summers when I returned from college. I jogged in the morning before I started chores. As the sun came up, wild sunflowers in the ditch raised their heads towards the light. Rabbits and field mice scampered across the road. Cows bawled as I passed by, and the gravel crunched beneath my weight, my breath labored but even.

Sometimes, I ran at night. I could only see a few feet in front of me. The maintainer’s blade left a strip of dirt on either side of the road. I used it to navigate the road’s edge. Every noise—crickets chirping, wind blowing through milkweeds, coyotes’ calls—magnified itself in the darkened silence. From the ditch, the glow of stray cats’ eyes followed me; at least that’s what I told myself. It could have been skunks or coyotes or raccoons. At night, I only went to the nearest corner, a quarter mile away, and back several times. Fear held me back from pressing further into the darkness.

To most people, there’s hardly a dip in the road. But I knew every washboard, every soft shoulder, every drainage route. I’m home.

The elm trees my great-grandmother planted stood like guards beside the road. I entered the driveway and toke note of the wild mustard, at least a foot tall, growing up through the lava rocks in front of the house. There must have been a storm because part of the gutter over the garage hung off the roof. Small branches had fallen onto the overgrown lawn. The elm tree my parents planted on the south side of the house had doubled in size. As I followed the driveway around back, I noticed the suckers growing at its base.

The headlights glared on the large deck my father and brother built. My mom talked about buying whiskey barrels and loading them with flowers to put on the deck. She never did. She’d say, “We should put lights along the sidewalk” or “We should plant new trees.” Action was never her strong suit. She also didn’t realize everything would fall apart so quickly.

I got out and heard the echo of the car door shutting. From the glow of the yard light, I noticed dandelions and sandburs growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. Buffalo grass encroached the gravel driveway. The deck needed another stain. I paid attention to these things because they were my jobs—weeding, mowing, staining.

Cows gathered in the corral. A few bawled. When I look up into the sky, the Milky Way and a thousand other stars seemed strewn across the sky like seeds thrown by a pioneer from a grain bag slung over his shoulder.

I unlocked the door with one of two house keys we ever had made. I’m not sure how I ended up with one. I walked through the garage, up the wooden steps to the side door.

•••

During the divorce settlement, my mother had a choice: keep the house or sell it to my father. With all the siblings’ consent, my brother said, “Sell it.”

We assumed my father wouldn’t let go of the house—there’s little market for farmhouses. He didn’t need the house. The day he left my mother, he moved in with his girlfriend, Susie. I knew nothing of their relationship. She’s a ghost who has stolen my father and haunts the rest of us.

Three months after my father left, my sisters and I helped my mom move to Greeley, into an apartment. We took essentials—her bed, sheets, a few pots and pans, her clothes, the kitchen table and chairs, a love seat and recliner. My mother wandered around the house, unsure what to take, unsure what to leave. She’d point to the TV cabinet or the floral living room sofa, and ask, “Do you think this can fit?” We’d shake our heads, compromise on something smaller. By afternoon, we loaded all we thought could fit into the small two-bedroom apartment my mother and I’d share for two years.

The apartment never felt like home. In fact, even with a husband and children of my own, nowhere has ever felt so truly like my home except the farm. But the apartment my mother and I shared felt like a stopping point on the way to somewhere else—somewhere better. Living together while we both went to college reversed our roles. She relied on me to help her adjust to college and living in town. From day to day, I didn’t know what to expect. Some days we’d talk and laugh about classes like roommates. Other days, I’d find her sobbing at the kitchen table. I’d talk her through getting flipped off in traffic or prioritizing the myriad projects due for her classes. Most of the time, she couldn’t be a mother. I didn’t expect her to.

•••

When I visited the house, I wanted my mother to be at the table sipping a cup of tea, reading a book, waiting. I wanted my father to be asleep in his chair like so many other nights. Always, I imagined the idealized version of my parents, the version I’d actually had for many, many years, rather than the desperate pair I last witnessed: the woman who locked herself away from us; the man stumbling home, drunk.

I opened the door to darkness. Staleness filled the air like in an empty grain bin. I turned on the hallway light and wandered from room to room like a sleepwalker. I don’t know what I was looking for—I don’t know what I expected to find.

From the garage door, I walked into the kitchen. A towel hung in the refrigerator door. A teacup and plate rested in the dish rack. A 1996 calendar on the wall showed the month of March, the month my father left.

•••

I could’ve grabbed the cookie sheet or the over-sized pan my mom talked about missing. I could’ve taken the flower-print sheets for her bed from the hallway closet filled with towels, sheets, and linens. But I didn’t. I wanted it to stay the same like a shrine or museum. If I took something back, my mother would know I visited the house. She thought I was out with friends having fun.

We had an understanding—I can come back to the apartment whenever I want without question, as long as no boys stay the night. I didn’t want to see the men my mother might have stay the night at the kitchen table in the morning, either. Yet, I shouldn’t have worried. My mother has never been on a date. I’m sure she worried about me, but it would’ve compounded her worry to know I made trips to the house.

As I wandered into the combined living room and dining room, the absence of the table, chairs, and recliner reminded me everything had changed. Shannon’s basketball and track pictures stood on top of the TV cabinet, though the TV is missing. I walked into the hallway to my parents’ room.

I saw the imprints in the carpet where their bed had sat. I looked at the long, oak dresser with a mirror attached. On top, my mother always placed a crocheted runner, her Chanel perfume, our school pictures, and a framed wedding picture to one side. As things deteriorated in the marriage, she took everything down but the framed 8 x 10 wedding picture in the center of the dresser.

My parents stand at the altar facing empty pews of the congregation. They are young; my mother holds a bouquet in manicured hands; my father looks stiff in his white jacket and black dress pants, a crew cut. It’s the only picture my mother ever displayed of their wedding. They had an album, but my mother rarely let us look at it. She didn’t want us to put fingerprints on the pictures. She wanted it to be perfect. Though so many times, even before my father’s affair, her distance and moods created strange obstacles we carefully navigated like cows walking on ice.

I don’t know why she left the wedding picture on the dresser. I like to think she wanted my father to see it, that she wanted to show she’d always been committed, that she’d done her best.

I didn’t stay long in my parents’ room; I couldn’t make myself. I turned off the hallway light and headed downstairs.

I entered my room at the foot of the stairs. I scanned a few framed photos of high school friends on the wall and wandered over to my bureau. I opened the top drawer and shuffled through papers: canceled checks, notes from an old boyfriend, and birthday cards from my grandparents.

On top of my bureau sat a jewelry box with a small drawer for earrings or bracelets. Because I only have a couple pairs of earrings, I put cash inside. When I opened the drawer, a wad of bills spilled out. I counted thirty-seven dollars. I shoved them back into the drawer. I must’ve been saving for something. I don’t remember what.

I scanned my closet filled with old clothes. I hadn’t had time to pack them for Goodwill the day we moved my mom. After a while, I switched off my light.

I knew it was late. It must have been close to two in the morning. I should go back. But I didn’t want to leave. Even though it was abandoned, even though only memories lived there, even though I couldn’t actually stay, I longed for the place even more.

•••

Upstairs in the kitchen, I pulled out drawers filled with silverware, dishtowels, and recipe books. I rummaged through the junk drawer filled with duct tape, Christmas bows, and birthday candles. I opened each cupboard. I looked at the canned soup and vegetables, Tupperware, plates and glasses. I stopped in the hallway just before the garage door and looked at the bulletin board on the wall.

An old school menu and a few jokes clipped out of the newspaper were tacked to the board. Our kindergarten pictures lined the bottom of the bulletin board. But at the top was a family picture, one of only two we ever had professionally taken.

I’m about two. I sit on a stool beside my father’s chair. My father is in the middle of the photo holding Shannon on his lap. Lisa props herself up on her hand on the floor by my father’s feet. My brother and mom stand behind my father on either side, their hands on his shoulders. We wear our best seventies outfits in the color of tangerines and avocados.

While Shannon and I have blank expressions because we’re too young to know what’s going on, the other four seem happy. Darren smiles as though he’s heard a joke. Lisa’s heard the same joke but won’t allow her teeth to show in her smile. My parents look bright, content. They seem to have no inkling of what’s to come—the joys, the heartaches, and everything in between.

I locked the door behind me.

•••

In August 2000, my sister and I were back in mom’s apartment in Greeley for the summer when my father called. He decided to rent the house to a couple with twins. The young man had moved back home to work on his family’s farm, like my father had, over thirty years before.

I hadn’t visited the house for almost two years. To accommodate the renters, we drove from Greeley to the farm three times in one week. Darren had to work; Lisa lived out of state. On the first trip, we wandered around for hours putting a few items in boxes, but mostly we were mesmerized. One of us would find an object—the cast from when I broke my wrist in fourth grade, my mother’s wedding china, the dress Shannon wore for prom—and we told stories.

The next time we made a plan to work room by room. It helped us focus. The third trip, we brought a moving truck. Like a cowboy trying to zip a winter jacket with too many layers underneath, we crammed the truck full, barely leaving space to close the door. We left odds and ends inside—an old bookcase, bunk beds, a broken record player, among other items. We figured my father could move the rest.

After we loaded the truck, each of us took one last walk around the house. Near dark, Shannon said, “We should go.” My mother asked for a few more minutes. She went to the front living room, pulled back the sheer curtains and looked out across the lawn. It hadn’t been mowed. The limbs of the elm trees swayed slightly. The pasture across the road was brown from the August sun. Tumbleweeds caught in the barbed wire fence dangled and thrashed against the barbs, trying to break free.

The setting sun left brush strokes of orange and red across the horizon. My mom turned from the window and said, “I’m ready.” Before we walked out the door, I put the key on the kitchen counter.

•••

Last June, my husband Miguel and I drove by the house with our boys. We were traveling through on our way to work a summer teaching job in Nebraska. I hadn’t been back inside the house since that August, almost fifteen years before. I asked Miguel to slow down as we approached. Wild irises bloomed at the lawn’s edge. A large flowerpot filled with petunias sat on the cement steps leading to the front door. Fewer trees stood in the backyard, and a plastic infant swing swayed in the breeze on an elm bordering the road.

Because Miguel drove slowly, the boys thought we were stopping and said, “We get out Papí? Get out?”

“You have to ask your Mama.”

“Get out Mama? Get out?”

I leaned over to look at them in their car seats, their hazel eyes wide with anticipation then turned back to the house. I scanned the yard, the line of trees, and the outbuildings. I examined the front window and envisioned the formal living room the way we left it so many years ago: the piano against the south wall, the couch tucked between two lamp tables facing the large windows, the swivel chair to the side; a place just big enough for everyone to return.

I thought of all the secretive trips—how I couldn’t stay away. I want to talk to that girl standing in the kitchen. I want to tell her she needs to stop holding on to everything with clenched fists; she needs to let go. But I’m sure if the younger version of myself and I could be in the same room together, she might say the same thing back to me.

What would that girl think if she knew years later she’d still be troubled, that she’d be married but have paranoid moments when she thought her husband would leave, that no other place had yet felt like home? What would she think if she knew she’d so internalized the shape and feel of the land that memories would never satisfy her?

I knew if I asked, the family who lives there now would open their door, would let us wander through each room. But it would be their furniture, their pictures on the wall, their memories filling the house. I want my sons to see where I grew up, to somehow understand, but that would mean breaking the spell, the one that holds my childhood family suspended in time, just beyond the sheer curtains in the front windows.

I turned and said, “No, not yet. Not yet.”

•••

DANA SALVADOR’s work is forthcoming in South Dakota Review and has been featured in Fourth Genre, Cold Mountain Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Literary Mama, among others. Additionally, she’s the recipient of a Vogelstein Foundation Grant and the recipient of the 2016 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She sometimes leaves posts at www.danasalvador.wordpress.com.

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Memento Mori

Photo by Gina Easley

By Jennifer Richardson

I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, ten months after the Northridge earthquake that killed around fifty people and split the 10 Freeway in two. Despite my absence during that disaster, the specter of a quake has haunted my years in southern California since, most recently when we bought a house in Ventura some seventy miles north of L.A. I remember reading the disclosures that explained the house wasn’t merely in a fault zone—much of Southern California property is—but rather a liquefaction zone. In the event of an earthquake we could expect ground water to rise and transform the soil under the house to quicksand, thus fulfilling a phobia I’d acquired as a kid when the concept of quicksand was first introduced to me in an episode of The Incredible Hulk. That word, liquefaction, was so blunt, so at odds with the Edward-Scissorhands-suburbia aesthetic of the street, that it somehow made it easier to dismiss it as hyperbole.

I mentioned it to my husband who blithely replied that as long as we could get earthquake insurance—we could—he didn’t see a problem. We signed the contract and moved in. Two and half years later the big one came, but instead of an earthquake we got a fire.

•••

California’s largest wildfire in modern history, the Thomas Fire, started on a Monday evening in early December 2017 in the hills above Santa Paula, a sleepy agricultural town with a charming, lost-in-time main street. Fueled by relentless Santa Ana winds, the fire traversed fifteen miles of rugged terrain to consume five hundred structures in the foothills of Ventura on its first of what would go on for thirty-eight nights, culminating in the deadly Montecito mudslides of early January.

In the space of a mile, downtown Ventura slopes from the hills to the Pacific, forming a makeshift amphitheater facing Pierpont Bay. That night residents were compelled to turn their gaze from the sea to the hills. Friends who live on lower ground pulled lawn chairs into their driveway and stayed up all night watching what they described as Hades descending into the city. Earlier that day we had driven up to Berkeley, where I rent an apartment for work, and we didn’t hear about the fire until early the next morning. Alerted by a Facebook message, I turned to Twitter for news: the Hawaiian Gardens, an iconic mid-century apartment building a quarter of a mile from our house, had just burned down.

What followed was a frenzied morning of trying to ascertain if we still had a house—by mid-morning neighbors had confirmed that, for the moment, we did—and what we should do next. My grandparents’ hillside Southern California home had once survived a wildfire when a quick-thinking neighbor emptied his pool onto it, a memory that left me thinking that we at least ought to try to do something. At my urging, my husband agreed to fly down—mostly, I think, to prevent me from going. I dropped him off at the Oakland airport later that morning then called my parents in Florida to tell them we were okay, annoyed that they hadn’t yet called to ask. Despite my father’s penchant for watching Fox News, he seemed completely oblivious to the severity of the situation.

While Doug travelled, we composed a list over email of what he should try to get out if he could reach the house—our neighborhood was under a mandatory evacuation and would remain so for over a week. We’d planned that he would try to retrieve the car we had left in the garage and his passport, but the notion of things you take with you in this kind of situation remained elusive and, in the end, ours was surprisingly prosaic. He nominated some entirely replaceable small household electronics, and I chose a few pieces of jewelry I seldom wore and some photo albums dating from pre-smartphone days that we hadn’t opened in years.

It wasn’t that we didn’t value the contents of our house. Collectively they told a story of our lives, both the things we had brought with us individually to the marriage and those we had acquired together since. To single anything out—say the garage-sale painting that had hung over our sideboard in every house or the mermen Christmas ornaments we’d left permanently hanging on the curtain railing—felt hopelessly arbitrary.

The only other thing we came up with was a gold coin that my father had given us for Christmas a few years earlier. It had no sentimental value and around a thousand dollars of actual value, but we had both immediately thought of it because of what my father, a Trump-voting Republican, had said when he gave it to us. Obama was president at the time, which for him constituted a threat to his family worthy of equipping us all with portable currency and a conspiratorially whispered explanation of “in case you ever need to flee.” He’d acted on an imagined risk and failed to notice a real one. And while it wasn’t for the reason he’d envisioned, it was no less unnerving that my father’s prophecy was coming true.

•••

Doug’s return visit accomplished little other than retrieving our uninspired list of “treasured things” and giving him a chest infection brought on by smoke inhalation. The power was out so he couldn’t stay at the house, but he did skirt the evacuation order to hose it down in those first few days. After a few more nerve-wracking days of being evacuated from motels farther and farther up the coast, he drove back to Berkeley, where we obsessively watched SMS alerts and the Twitter feed of the fire department’s Public Information Officer. We hoped for an estimated containment date but got more red flag warnings.

We returned to Ventura together two weeks after the fire had started to find our house unscathed barring a thick coating of ash. While the fire continued to torment Santa Barbara County, life in Ventura began to resume some normality in the week ahead of Christmas. Air quality was finally good enough to go outside, and everywhere I went, from the dentist to the grocery store, people were telling their own harrowing fire stories. There was a compulsive need to share as a way to exorcise the trauma. Every repetition was therapeutic, an affirmation the still-disbelieving storyteller was okay, even if their belongings weren’t.

In nearby Ojai, a resort town with a tightknit community, artists Sarah Mirk and Lucy Bellwood provided a sanctioned outlet for such storytelling when they hosted a benefit at the local bookstore. Residents read aloud the stories of what they took with them when they evacuated. These ranged from a concert tee-shirt collection to a Purple Heart and were compiled into a zine that was being sold to raise money for people affected by the fire. It was the most meta of mementos: a souvenir about souvenirs.

Despite the worthy cause, I didn’t buy one. The anxiety of the past two weeks had been all-consuming, and I wanted no reminder of it. I was also nagged by the sense of being an impostor, an interloper in this community’s sacred ritual. I was not from Ojai—I was hardly from Ventura, one of seven cities we’d lived in during the last decade and not even the place where I now worked most weeks. I may have been a citizen of the world, but I was also a citizen of nowhere, incapable of partaking fully in either local tragedy or triumph. I adopted my fallback position of consumer, bought a book to support the store—which had been forced to close during the fire—and left the benefit early.

That same week I discovered another breed of fire souvenirs while walking on the boardwalk at the beach. The Ventura County Fairgrounds had been converted into the command center for the Thomas Fire, supporting and housing some of the over 8,500 firefighters that worked the blaze. Along a grassy strip separating the fairground parking lot from the beach, a cottage industry of disaster had sprung up in the form of several tents stocked with Thomas Fire–themed merchandise.

Upon being confronted with a pink tee-shirt bearing the likeness of Santa and his reindeer flying towards a full moon over a photo of the blazing Ventura hills while firefighters look on, capped off with a “Happy New Year 2018” message, my immediate reaction was to recoil. The woman working behind the table was clearly practiced in handling this kind of response and volunteered that the shirts were something firefighters, many of whom were from out of town, could bring their kids as a souvenir. There was a deserved pride associated with fighting what was now on track to be the largest wildfire in California’s history, and the presence of a few uniformed emergency services workers surveying the merchandise at another table lent plausibility to her explanation.

I swallowed my judgement and walked on, mulling over this idea of disaster souvenirs and trying to think of precedents. My sister, who works in law enforcement, had helped clean up after 9/11, and I remembered she’d given my husband a commemorative 9/11 tee-shirt from her squad that Christmas, albeit with a much more understated logo. Did the companies who had set up shop outside the Thomas Fire command center crisscross the country hunting disasters like storm chasers? My subsequent request for an interview with the Santa-over-inferno tee-shirt maker received no response.

•••

Sometime after Christmas, I finally succumbed to the lure of a souvenir from the fire. A local brewery was selling tote bags and tee-shirts to benefit fire victims. I bought the tote, reasoning I can always use another grocery bag, but mostly now really, compulsively wanting it. I attribute my change of heart to wanting a tangible reminder that the trauma of the past few weeks had in fact occurred.

Of course the evidence was all around town, from the charred hillside behind city hall where we often hiked, to rubble-strewn lots lorded over by incongruous chimney stacks. But the path of a wind-driven fire is unpredictable, and its destruction had been haphazard. The fire had left no visible damage in more pockets of the city than not. As spring arrived, the hillsides would green and memories would recede. Here on the patio of the brewery with the 101 Freeway rushing by on one side and a quintessential California blue sky overhead, the possibility of a fire threatening the entire city had already started to seem as implausible as our entire street collapsing into quicksand.

The design of the tote bag had also appealed to me in a way that the Santa-over-inferno tee-shirts had not, but it was peculiar in its own way. Two crossed hands, palms up, hold a black heart that drips what appears to be oil—a strange choice considering the bag is commemorating a fire—over illustrations of local icons: a cactus, a bell tower, our neoclassical city hall. Between the heart and the line drawings a discreet line of text reads “Helping Hands Thomas Fire XII.IV.MMXVII,” the Roman numerals arguably as pretentious as Santa Claus over an inferno is crass.

Despite their differences, both items fulfill two of our keenest contemporary needs—to buy and to broadcast: I was there. Self-conscious of this fact, I’ve yet to use the bag. But it hangs on the coat stand by the front door of my Berkeley apartment, ready to be filled with treasure should I ever need to flee.

•••

JENNIFER RICHARDSON is the author of a memoir, Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage. She contributes to Edible Ojai and Ventura County and is working on a lifetime reading plan app, booketlist in her spare time. Find her online at http://jenniferrichardson.net/ and on Twitter @baronessbarren.

Read more FGP essays by Jennifer Richardson.

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In Plane View

Photo by Gina Easley

By Wendy Fontaine

There are airplane seats in my living room. A row of five, straight-backed, with navy-blue and charcoal upholstery, canvas seatbelts with silver buckles that still shine. They must have come from a big plane, a 747 perhaps, something that flew over international waters. Bulky and awkward, like nothing you’ve ever seen in a Pottery Barn catalog or a Living Spaces commercial, the seats are not my taste. I’d prefer they weren’t in our apartment at all, but they belong to my husband, James, and predate the beginning of our relationship. Over the years, I have tried to ask as few questions as possible about the seats, as if my disinterest could somehow make them fade into the background.

When guests come, the airplane seats are the first thing they see. “Are those from a real plane?” they ask. I roll my eyes. James smirks and nods. The guests search for appropriate responses, which vary from shock to envy, depending upon their gender.

No one ever sits in the seats, but if they did, they’d feel the scratch of polyester against the backs of their thighs. They’d notice a hard metal frame pressing into their shoulder blades. If they closed their eyes, they might hear the deep hum of the engine or the sharp rattle of a beverage cart. They might even feel the bounce of turbulence no longer there.

•••

Fifteen years ago, when he was working as a production assistant on television shows around Los Angeles, James found the airplane seats in a heap of gear outside a studio in the San Fernando Valley. After a show wraps, crewmembers tear down the set, separating scrap materials from furniture and other items that can be reused. The seats were either on their way back to a prop warehouse or bound for the trash. But James and his roommates, who were also working as PAs and stuntmen at the time, snagged the seats and brought them back to their shared, three-bedroom apartment in the city.

The guys, most of whom came to LA from the rugged streets of Boston, were just getting started in the business. They worked long, entry-level shifts and pooled their earnings to cover rent, booze, and cable TV. Back then, much of their furniture came from the curb. A large couch, swayback and gray like an old mule. Kitchen chairs. End tables. Even a futon that would later become my daughter’s bed.

James and his friends put the seats on a wooden riser in their living room to create movie-theater seating, an optimal arrangement for watching Super Bowls and Stanley Cups. A projector transformed the opposite wall into a giant screen. I didn’t know them then, but I imagine them also watching the shows they had been working on at the time, scanning the credits for their own names.

•••

One day, while vacuuming the space around the airplane seats, I see what appears to be a serial number stamped on the back of the chairs, along with a date: Sept. 25, 1992. An internet search of the serial number proves fruitless, but the date makes me smile. That’s the year James and I graduated from high school. We went to the same school in western Maine, though we were hardly friends at the time. He was the captain of the football team who dated the head cheerleader. I was captain of the basketball and field hockey teams. The titles were mostly honorary; I was a hard worker but a lousy athlete. With only sixty kids in our graduating class, we knew each other’s names but never had a single conversation—not that either of us can recall, anyway.

After graduation, he studied advertising at Florida State University, then moved to Los Angeles to find work in show business. Along the way, he was the life of every party, a distinction he earned with excessive drinking and risky decisions.

I wouldn’t know about it until much later, but when he was in his twenties, a drunken car wreck nearly severed James’ right arm just below the shoulder. Doctors said he’d never regain full use of it, but after surgery and physical therapy, he proved them wrong. He even played football again, as a fullback with a semi-pro team that practiced three nights a week and competed on the weekends. More than once, he was the team’s most valuable player.

•••

After high school, I went to the University of Maine and got a degree in journalism. James never married, but I got hitched right away, mostly to escape the paper mill town where we grew up. My first husband was in the military which meant we moved every four years. In each new town, I got a job as a reporter at the local newspaper, covering everything from tedious school board meetings to gruesome homicides. Through work, I found a way to belong.

After ten years of marriage, our daughter Angie was born, and I quit my job to take care of her. While her dad was away on short deployments, she and I went to mommy and me yoga classes, story time at the local library, and swimming lessons for infants at the YMCA. I nursed her and made her baby food from scratch. Our days were smooth and peaceful, easy and predictable. But then the clouds rolled in.

When Angie was two, her father and I split. He had an affair with a woman he had known back in high school, who now had kids of her own. After that, Angie and I left our family home and moved back to the paper mill town, where I got a job bottling pills in the supermarket pharmacy, rented an apartment and filed for divorce. Money was tight, so we furnished our new place with things from yard sales and thrift stores. Mismatched dishes. A faded pink rocking chair. A kitchen table that wobbled, no matter how I attempted to fix it.

After a year of court hearings, the judge granted me full custody of Angie, meaning all the decisions about caring for her were up to me. There were doctors’ appointments and tantrums, nightmares and fevers, potty training and time-outs. I was her mother and her father, never feeling as though I was doing either job well enough. The hardest part, though, was focusing on Angie when my own heart was broken, when I was afraid of what each new day would bring, when I couldn’t imagine a time when things would feel normal again.

Instead of being home with my daughter, making her meals from scratch and teaching her the alphabet, I dropped her off at daycare in the morning and went to the pharmacy to hand out Vicodin and Viagra for eight dollars an hour, then warmed up macaroni and cheese for dinner in the afternoon. Each evening, I bathed her, read her bedtime books, and cuddled her under the covers, wondering if this was it—if this was the life we were meant to live, in this small town, where everything was bumpy and rough. I missed our old life, our sense of stability. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d wake up and, just for a moment, forget where we were.

•••

For two years, Angie and I juggled work, daycare, and life in our little rental apartment. We celebrated birthdays and Christmases and made a few friends. But the paper mill town never felt like home. When she was four, we had a yard sale of our own. We sold the dishes and the furniture, then drove south to Boston and boarded a plane bound for Los Angeles.

During my divorce, James and I had begun an email correspondence that turned into friendship. I wrote to him, at first, because I was lonely and talking to adults kept me from going stir crazy. He wrote back, maybe, because his roommates had all moved out and he needed someone to vent to about work. In our emails, we told each other what we had been doing since high school. I shared the details of my breakup and the struggles of parenting. He wrote about the parties, the accident, and the day he decided to quit drinking. I admired his resolve, his self-control, and discipline; he appreciated my tenacity. Our friendship turned into intrigue, and intrigue turned into romance. He started sending Angie and me little gifts, playful things to keep us smiling: a red-and-white cowgirl lunchbox for her, a coffee mug shaped like Buddha for me. Then he sent plane tickets.

The trip marked Angie’s first time on an airplane, and she spent most of the five-hour flight looking out the window at a blanket of clouds, mesmerized by how soft the world looked from high up. I passed the time imagining what things would be like in California and wondering if James could handle being around a demanding preschooler. The visit was a test that I suspected we would fail. It was easy to romanticize a relationship from three thousand miles away. Being together every day might be a different story.

That week, James took us to all the usual tourist spots. The Hollywood sign. Venice Beach. In-N-Out Burger. Angie liked him instantly. She sat next to him at dinner, asked to hold his hand when we crossed streets, and pretended to be his pet dog—her favorite game of make-believe. But it was the quiet evenings at his place that hooked me, when he and Angie curled up on that old swayback couch to watch superhero movies, her forehead resting on the jagged scar along his bicep.

After Angie and I returned to Maine, the paper mill town felt even less like home than it had before. I knew that no matter how hard I worked or how long we stayed, the town would never be where we belonged. James invited us to live with him, and I spent several months waffling about whether moving was the right thing to do—for Angie and for myself. I was afraid of making a huge mistake, of giving up our safe haven. But I also knew that if we didn’t go, if we didn’t at least try, I would always wonder what life might’ve been like for the three of us. So Angie and I had our yard sale and went back to California. For good.

•••

In the years before our arrival, most of James’ curbside treasures had disappeared—taken or disposed of by various roommates as they moved up in the world and moved on, into their own places or in with girlfriends and wives. James had moved up, too; no longer a production assistant on television shows, he had become a computer engineer on blockbuster movie productions, the kind that involve the most famous actors in Hollywood.

The airplane seats remained, though, along with a Scarface poster, the beer-stained carpets and a shelf of half-filled liquor bottles. His party days were behind him. No more drinking, no more reckless behavior. But the bottles and other trappings stayed—reminders that good times can be good, but they can also go bad.

Of course, I had my own attachments. After two years of single parenting, I drew imaginary lines around my daughter and myself. When I went grocery shopping, I bought only the things Angie and I liked. When I cooked, I made enough for two. I kept our laundry and our money separate. At night, I crawled into bed with my daughter instead of the man who would eventually become my husband. Some of it was habit, but most of it was fear. How could I trust someone again, not only with my heart but also with my daughter’s? Sometimes it’s hard to let go of the past, even when you know that letting go is the last step before flying free.

James never questioned my hesitancy or complained about feeling left out. He simply waited to see how things would evolve. Then one day, while he and Angie lounged on the couch, it suddenly became clear: if I kept my guard up, if I continued to hold him at arm’s length, then so would Angie. Love doesn’t live inside imaginary lines. It is big and risky. It is the whole sky or nothing at all.

•••

Now Angie’s ten years old, and James and I are married. In time, he took down the Scarface poster, tossed the liquor-bottle mementos, and replaced the carpets. I learned how to shop and cook for a family of three and started sleeping in my husband’s bed. We bought a new sofa, brown suede with cream stitching, and put that old swayback couch on the curb for someone else.

The airplane seats, however, are still here.

I would love for them to disappear one day, perhaps go to a storage facility or maybe into the trash. But the chances of that happening are slim. James wants to hold onto them, even though they no longer go with the décor.

I understand the seats are part of his past, a part he isn’t ready to relinquish just yet. They hold memories of the fun he had with a particular group of guys and how hard they all worked to make names for themselves. Maybe they also remind him of his retreat from alcohol addiction, when he sharply and decisively changed the trajectory of his life.

If that’s the case, then the seats remind me of something too: that it’s all right to put my flaws in the middle of the room. I can struggle with the past and feel insecure about the future, and James will love me anyway. I can be hesitant and fearful, territorial and overprotective—it won’t matter. Love is also staying in the room with another person’s imperfections. It’s sitting with their undesirable elements without making demands or asking too many questions.

Even though I hate the airplane seats, this apartment feels like home. Angie and I have finally landed where we belong. So I’ll keep the silly seats forever if I have to, if James wants them. I’ll keep dusting them, keep vacuuming around them and dressing them up with throw pillows. I’ll even sit in them for a movie or two, scanning the credits for his name.

•••

WENDY FONTAINE’s work has appeared in Compose Literary Journal, Hippocampus Magazine, Passages North, Readers Digest, River Teeth, the anthology Turning Points: Stories about Choice and Change, and elsewhere. In 2015, she won the Tiferet Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Wendy lives and teaches in Los Angeles and is currently seeking representation for her memoir, Leaves in the Fall. www.wendyfontaine.com

 

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